'I should have cut down one of those clappers, Bramble,' I told him. 'I missed my chance. We may see no other sport.'
The stream was about six metres wide, and shallow. It made suave noises as it slid past roots and rat holes bored in its muddy sides. The stands of bamboo became so dense that we were forced away from the banks. Yet I obstinately led the cob back to the water; the stream at least had a direction in which to go — I had lost that benefit. Once, I called loudly; the sound of my own unanswered voice disconcerted me.
After a diversion, we got back to the stream. It had become wider and shallower. Thickets of brambles intertwined with massed pines barred our way to one side, so that we were forced to enter the water to progress. Ahead, the way looked dark. These were the primaeval forests which had once covered the entire world.
Still leading Bramble, I pressed on through gnarled elder trees, their warty barks covered with moss. The stream's noise was harsh now, as it ran over cobbles. I was encouraged, thinking that we were moving into different territory and might be able to join with other people, or at least come on a landmark for guidance.
Instead, the stream disappeared. Pressing through more elders, heavy with purple berries, I stopped so abruptly that Bramble butted his head against my back, nearly pitching me into the water. A cliff rose sheer before us, its rock dark as a jailer's face, shattered pines hanging like unkempt hair over its brow. Our stream ran into a low mouth at the base of the rock, throwing up a small continuous wave before speeding into blackness.
The cliff formed part of a continuous rift in the ground which continued on either side, making it difficult to proceed in any direction. For a fanciful moment, I wondered if I had come to the end of Malacia, where an entirely opposed despotism began; the idea was reinforced by a change in vegetation marked by the rift, for the light-leafed deciduous trees died out by the cliff, to be replaced entirely by rows of pine and fir, stretching ahead as far as the eye could see, and towering upwards from the lip of the cliff. Their foliage was outlined against a distinctly brownish tint in the sky; dusk was coming on apace.
I found that I was being watched by a bearded man. He stood regardless of danger on the highest point of the cliff, above the mouth into which the stream flowed.
'Which is the way to Juracia?' I called.
No answer. I could not see him clearly. He appeared to be naked except for a rough pair of trousers. His immobility was disquieting. I resented the way he stared down at me.
'Have you a tongue, man?'
No answer. It was not a man but a statue. Not a statue of a man but a statue of a satyr. It was manlike from the loins upward; below that, it was a goat, and a pair of small goat horns nestled in its unruly hair.
I was disappointed yet relieved. Perhaps it is preferable to be ignored by a statue than a man.
So there I was, with my horse breathing softly beside me, his nose at my shoulder, and night coming on. I decided that we would ford the stream. The going looked easier on the other side.
Still leading Bramble, I moved through the water under the stony eye of the satyr, and climbed the other bank. As I was about to remount, my nostrils caught an odour of something burning. The scent moved to my brain and established dominance there, leading me as if by a leash, directing my feet, tugging at my clothes. All about me that corrupt sepia tinge increased, permeating atmosphere and forms, so that I understood how all those forms were united in the conspiracy of their birth, when they had been incarnated from the principal of Evil itself. That hideously dominating scent, together with the haggard light, emphasized that I moved among matter which was mere semblance, a phantasm of the breath of the Lord of Darkness and Chaos.
A lick of that darkness showed ahead and in the curly centre of the darkness, a tongue of fire. Bulky satyrs, their shapes barely distinguishable from the boles of trees, marched beside me, their goaty odour mingling with the smoke smell. They marched, I say, but movement like matter had been reduced to an impression. We were all strokes of an infernal paint-brush, shadowy recreations of greater dimensions, the only reality belonging to the bud of fire and the night ahead.
A great sinking took place within me — that movement was real enough to my spirit — as if I were slowly descending into rock and the unhallowed places of the earth. With the sinking went an oppressive emotion for which there is no name, unless it be intuition: an intuition, as devious as the serpentine layers of smoke ahead, that we are cast upon the stage of life in bodily form for reasons ever beyond our comprehensions — beyond, because the reasons are too inimical to be comprehended. To know them would entail total destruction. This intuition filled me with something more enduring than fear: recognition. The ancient wickedness about me became part of me, as I was a part of it. I choked on a dusty mouthful of recognition. Little different was I from the goat-lipped satyrs. With a sly motion, my amulet slithered from my arm and fell to the forest floor, where it writhed as if wounded.
The carnal flame burned on an altar decorated by carved heads standing out from the stone. Round the altar stood six monstrous figures. They were regarding me. Above their hunched shoulders perched an owl, its face no more inhuman than theirs. It sat on a low branch, its wings spread wide as if it were about to launch itself at my eyes. Again, the sense of recognition.
Of these six brutish figures, I could see only the first two clearly. The others were obscured behind the massive cylinder of the altar. The prominent two wore stiff draperies decorated with insignias proclaiming them — I did not doubt it — to be exponents of the Natural Religion. Their features were hideous, as if shaped long ago from rude forms of earth. The leading wizard was cruel and malign, his nose, his mouth, hooked into a sneer above the luxuriant, brownish-red beard he sported. He wore a ludicrous pancake hat and clutched at the bulge of a huge phallus beneath the folds of his drapery. Almost in his shadow crouched a woman, her naked back scraping against a satanic face adorning the altar. Her breasts hung naked, as if in dejection, full, slightly elongated under their own weight as they swung from her body. She appeared to have been desecrated. Her clothes lay in tatters by her feet. She wore only a shift, the whiteness of which was stained by filth and blood. The sight of her filled me with intense sorrow.
As I surveyed these evil beings, I perceived that one of them was an ape, dressed in man's clothes and accepted by the rest as a sort of man. Another was a lizard-man, his face with its shallow jaw and hairless head peering at me through the stench rising from the sacrificial stone. The others shared his immobility.
It was the woman who spoke first. She raised her head slowly, looking at me from under fair brows. She was not old. Beauty was still about her, although her forehead was dewed with sweat and her mouth was bleeding.
'Help me,' she said.
Smiles flecked the lips of the magicians.
'Help me,' the woman repeated. She dragged herself into a sitting position. 'They claim that I am the Empress Theodora, widow of Theophilus, or a reincarnation of her. It's all lies. I never harmed anyone — Theodora's regiments fell like wolves upon the ancestors of these… these devils, pursuing them into untrodden forests, tearing them apart like wild animals, drowning or burning them in their hundreds of thousands— It was no affair of mine. Help me!' She stretched out a hand towards me.
Petrified as I was, I saw no way of helping her or myself.
The leading wizard said, 'Of what moment are your trifling personalities? What matters it who you believe yourselves to be?' These questions I felt at the time to be tremendously annihilating. 'Until you have understanding of your nature, your errors — like the errors of history — repeat and repeat themselves in an endless fiction. That is the only knowledge there is.'
I did not know I spoke, but I said something on the woman's behalf.
The second wizard spoke. He leaned forward stiffly, as if breaking through fabric, his beetling brows working as he lifted a hand and pointed at me.
'You are no more inviolate than a blade of g
rass, to be crushed beneath a casual tread.'
His mouth opened, yet it did not move as he seemed to speak. Something sulphurous lurked between his lips.
'The Original Curse that binds Malacia binds you also, boy, so beware!'
'What must I do?' I asked.
My voice came to me from far away, from another place or time. The words took an age to travel and, as they left me, I watched while the satyrs — they were seven, two of them females with pendulous dugs — galloped forward and seized the hapless woman who was accused of being a reincarnation of Theodora. They bore her to the ground, fighting for positions round her. Her shift was torn from her. She screamed. One of the goaty females bit her between the thighs, only to be pulled away and molested in her turn. The other satyrs piled in, until there was an obscene heap on the ground, comprising from the outside mainly kicking heels, heaving buttocks, and flailing tails. Pulling up his cumbersome gown, the first wizard lumbered forward to join in the animal sport, showing his fangs in a grin as he did so.
All this appeared the transaction of a moment, for the second wizard was answering my question — though whether in veritable words I could never afterwards determine.
'You must hope and despair, reform and sin, triumph and fail. How else do we live out our duality of spirit? Now you will learn the additional curse of knowledge — it will gain you no wisdom — it will only make more painful what you hitherto enjoyed through ignorance.'
'Of what knowledge do you speak?'
'The only knowledge there is — knowledge that ages you.
In some fashion which I cannot explain, I was then facing this reptilian visage across the smouldering altar, and he was saying, 'In conformity with our dual nature, every reward carries punishment, every punishment reward. Now that you are to be burdened with knowledge, you are permitted one wish, which will be immediately granted wherever our powers extend.'
Almost without thought — I was beyond that — I said, 'Then I wish to impress Armida Hoytola in some grand way, to save her from overwhelming danger, so that she may…'
My voice faltered and died. Not from the terror I was in but from the working of something — perhaps that dreadful knowledge already in action — which told me that I could never be happy with any woman whom I believed to be chained to me by reason of a spell or compulsion.
I stood with my mouth open, and smoke swirled about us. Darkness gathered, the cries of the woman became fainter. The fanged mouth of the wizard whispered something which might have been 'Your wish is granted.'
The flame blazed up between us. He raised his ragged sleeves above his head like a leather-tooth's wings and cried, 'Begone, youthful phantom!'
With his words came severe cold, cutting my eyes. I saw indistinctly. The horrid rout on the ground blurred with the undergrowth. The line of grimoire figures, man, ape and bird, faded into haphazard trees. Even the great stone melted into shadow indistinguishable from path. Only the flame on the altar, licking upward like a serpent tongue, remained clear to my vision, and that shrank into the distance. I fell to the ground.
I was alone in a remote grey world of old trees. Once again I became conscious of my poor self. Once again I heard the sound of the stream behind me. Once again I remembered that death was not the force that prevailed in the world.
Rain began, in the upper branches of the trees at first, then upon my body, approaching softly to remind me that weathers and seasons came and went. Slowly, I pulled myself up.
I had looked on accursed things. I turned to see how Bramble had fared. Poor creature, he had none of my human resilience. His rein dangled from a skeleton — a perfect skeleton of a horse, every bone shining as if still moist from the flesh of which it had been so sharply bereft. Even as I beheld it, the skeleton collapsed into a clattering pile of bones, which no one could ever make into a horse again. I picked out the spring-loaded spear from the remains, where it was attached to the saddle. There might still be natural dangers.
In the dark trampled grass, something gleamed: my amulet. Lifting it up, I found it almost too hot to touch.
After rinsing my face in the waters of the stream, I managed to quieten my quaking limbs.
If I had undergone satanic enlightenment, then I had to ask myself what exactly was the knowledge thrust upon me. Had I been visited by a religious revelation, couched in the accents of Natural Religion but fully in accord with the tenets of the Higher?
Was this something that happened to all men, but about which they were naturally reluctant to speak? Saying nothing about such a striking event — but what could one say about something so outside experience? — would create a barrier between oneself and one's friends. Dully, I wondered if such silences accounted for a fact I had observed, that whilst the young were cheerfully gregarious, the old wore acid countenances, on the whole keeping themselves apart as if friendship was something they mistrusted.
One thing was certain. The repulsive second wizard had granted me a wish. I must be careful. I thought of Desport.
It was said that when the great founder of our state first crossed the Toi and stood on the site of what was to become Stary Most, midnight fell at midday and a great magician — the First Magician — appeared to Desport. The First Magician allowed him one powerful wish, whereupon Desport wished that the city he and his scarcely human followers were founding as a monument to the two religions should forever remain unchanged, according to his plan. This wish it was that people referred to — not always for apotropaic reasons — as the Original Curse. Since then, according to legend, time had congealed about our city. Time and change may be distinguishable; they are inseparable as far as the affairs of men are concerned.
That odour which had led me along with the satyrs to the accursed site had been, I felt convinced, the very aroma of time.
The malevolent stillness of the forest brought me from my trance. Night moved hushed through the entwined trees. I had been squatting by the stream, transfixed. Now all that remained of my dread visitation was a distant glow of light, resembling the serpent tongue of the altar fire.
For minutes, I stood speculating on that flame, until it occurred to me that I could shake off the memory of the altar by discovering what the light was. If it indicated human company, it was more than welcome.
Stepping past the bones of poor Bramble, I made towards the glow. This hour was considered a propitious one by ancestral hunters. Ancestral animals, whether large or small, lost their energy at night and crept back into their lairs. Last to go were the giants, feeding as they went. The onset of dark made them easier game; but, on foot and lightly armed, I had no wish to get between one of them and its boudoir.
Keeping my spring-load spear at the ready, I climbed between the trunks of the trees, whose foliage formed a confused roof above me. Ahead, I made out a scene of human misfortune very different from the terrors I had recently confronted, yet sufficiently related by time and place for me to approach it with caution. A rough road crossed my trail. A carriage stood lopsidedly in a ditch by the side of the road. Two lamps gleamed on its side-brackets. Nearby burned the flambeau whose flame had led me to the spot; its tarry smell was pleasant to the nostrils. Between them, these lights formed a tent of vision in the entangled night.
The flambeau was stuck into a patch of soft ground, so that it shed some illumination on a young man crouching at the front wheel of the carriage with his back to me. I observed him and the girl nearby with the caution of a deer, stationing myself behind an ivy-maned oak to do so.
He was trying to prise up the wheel of the carriage, and meeting with no success. He interspersed his tugging with heaving, throwing in a swift kick now and again for luck. The horse, its eyeballs red in the reflected light, stirred anxiously between its shafts. When it whinnied, the man cursed it.
The young lady stood in the middle of the track. While neither cursing nor whinnying, she showed her dislike of the situation by walking about within the small circle of torchlight, twitching her skir
t and her hands.
There is nothing unusual about carriages running into ditches, or about young ladies being vexed by such accidents. What rendered this scene particularly interesting — and drove all thoughts of the recent visitation from my head — was the fact that the young lady was Armida Hoytola.
Impulsive fellow though I am, I did not immediately dash forth to her side. Surprise kept me where I was. And not only surprise. The scene had a piquancy in its own right; besides, it is always advantageous to observe a young lady when she does not know you are watching.
She was angry enough to be speechless. She made every motion eloquent with contempt, her skirts nicking scorn at the rough road, the night, the wretch who crouched in the ditch. He was almost under the carriage now. I could only see his heaving shoulder. I could not help wishing that she was in danger, so that I might leap forward and rescue her to our mutual advantage.
Hardly had this wish formed in my mind than there came a crashing in the undergrowth on the other side of the road, where shadows and trees alike grew impenetrably. As the noise registered on Armida's ears, she stopped and stared in an attitude of delightful agitation. La Singla could not have played it more effectively.
'Guy!' she called.
The man in the ditch climbed up from his wheel. I had no eyes for him. I was looking where Armida looked — to the nearby bushes which were suddenly dashed aside.
They say that the leopards and tigers of the Orient are endowed by nature with a cunning equal to man's. They stalk their prey and overcome it by surprise. They have strength, but their agility is superior to their strength, just as their cunning is superior to their agility. The great carnivorous ancestrals have only maniac strength.
Devil-jaws and their cousins, saw-mouths and tyrant-greaves, are primitive machines. When a devil-jaw — arch-ventail, to give it its proper name — scents prey, it heads for it direct, without considerations of silence or of any obstacle in its path. Unlike the leopard, it needs neither agility nor cunning, relying on its gigantic bulk, its mad stride, to bear it down at full tilt upon whatever it desires to destroy. Little stands in the way of seven metric tons of ravening animal.