I presumed, wrongly, that he meant the ways of the variants. In a suitably hushed voice, I enquired, ‘What did she do?’
Jericho jerked his head around to stare at me. His eyes appeared unfamiliar and I had to glance away. I did not look at him directly once during the time he told me what had happened, and his voice was painful to my ears, ringing with a new harsh note.
So, he had found the caravans of the Excoriasts, his heart full of dreams and scared hope. Dendria had been sitting on the steps of Intempera’s wagon, playing cat’s cradle with a red string, almost as if she’d been waiting for someone. Jericho described his approach to her, the dreadful nervousness and anticipation that had flowered in his heart. She had caught sight of him, and for a moment, seemed surprised and afraid. Then she had leapt nimbly to her feet and had come towards him, her sharp face filled with welcome. Jericho had known then that his petition had been granted and the fires of passion roared brightly in Dendria’s body and mind.
It was at this moment, I think, that Amaritude, with a certain mordant humour, had taken his sacrifice. Even as Dendria had reached for Jericho with her long-fingered hands, his heart had turned to a muscle of stone. Her face, alight with desire, had filled him with repugnance. The scent of her body, reaching out to him in yearning, had made him gag. He no longer cared for her. She had become an object of disgust and embarrassment. Dendria, however, had clearly never felt more drawn to Jericho. Her obsession was evidently unique and total, which was only to be expected if Amaritude had infected her heart.
Jericho, alarmed and sickened, had attempted to flee the scene. He talked incoherently of how he’d thought of running back to me for my support, but Dendria, since the object of her desire had manifested before her, intended not to be denied. Her lamentations had been loud, her finger-nails sharp. An awkward scuffle had taken place, quelled only when Intempera herself, roused from a snooze by the din, had come billowing out of the caravan and separated them.
‘I had to hide from her all night,’ Jericho said, adding accusingly, ‘Where were you?’
I swallowed the sharp retort that came like bile to my lips. Inside, my spirits were singing like a heavenly choir. This was triumph, but I sensed that the smoke of battle hid vile carnage, and when it cleared the victory might not be as sweet. ‘If I had known, Jericho, I would have been here for you, but how could I know? The purpose of our being here was your pursuit of the cidaris, after all.’
Jericho made a harrumping sound. ‘We must leave at once,’ he said.
Dendria trailed us for several sennights. She was a sick wraith at our heels, and the strength of her obsession was as painful to Jericho as her indifference and aloofness had been before. I realised very soon that he feared her, to the point of phobia. He dreaded her touch as much as some dread the touch of spiders or snakes. Of course, his dreams were full of her. The most regular nightmare involved Dendria creeping up over the sides of the dinghy and stealing to Jericho’s cabin, where she smothered him with her body. In this dream, he could neither call out nor move. Eventually, to assuage his night terrors, I began to keep watch until dawn, and sleep during the day, while he piloted the dinghy alone.
The end was horrible.
I was awoken at mid-day, by a hair-raising, womanly scream from Jericho. Pulling on my jacket, I threw myself from the cabin, still half asleep as I stumbled up the deck. The road was long and straight, running between dead, yellow fields, where nothing grew. A thin drizzle hazed down from a grey-green sky. It looked as if the land was in mourning.
Dendria must have overtaken us somehow, perhaps hitching a ride in a dirigible or hanging onto the runners of a train. Now, she ran towards us down the road; a hag, Jericho’s nemesis. In her disarray and wretchedness, it seemed she had become more alien: she was stick-thing, gnarled and knobbled, that might have squeezed out from a child’s worst dream into the waking world. Her colour was dreadful; dark and contused, and her head fronds were torn and ragged. For a moment, I felt pity. Jericho had made her into this.
I hurled myself forward, shouting out at Jericho to trigger the anchors, for Dendria was directly in our path. My voice was blown away from me, gathered up by the cold, cruel hands of the winds of hate, sweeping like blades across the empty fields.
I do not know whether he meant to run her down, or whether, in his panic, he lost control, but before I could reach him, she had disappeared beneath our runners and wheels, with a thin scream like that of a tortured bird and some other, more stomach-churning noises of breaking flesh and bone.
Cursing, slipping, I smacked Jericho away from the controls and brought the dinghy to a shuddering, bumpy halt. There was a sound of liquids spattering onto the road, and I jumped quickly over the side of the dinghy, worried our fuel-lines had been damaged. But the sounds came from what was entangled in the undercarriage: cidaris remains that jetted dark ichors like fluids that might come from a squid. I stood for a while, hands on hips, staring at the repulsive mess. Her head, mostly intact, was wedged between two moving parts and stared at me with expressionless eyes. Then, I became angry and yelled up at Jericho. I would not clean the bits of Dendria from the dinghy: it was unfair! I’d put up with so much, but this!
Jericho moaned and whimpered above me, hunched down, rocking to and fro. He seemed not to hear me, although I heard him say clearly, ‘Now, she has won. Now, she will haunt me. Forever.’
Eventually, I poked what I could away from the dinghy with a long stick, and later coasted it through a shallow stream, which seemed to do the trick.
Jericho was inconsolable, and I was forced to give him an overdose of erigeron to shut him up and stop him seeing things. I reckoned that if we sailed swiftly enough, I would reach the settlement of Migalissin within a day, where therapists might be able to do something with him. The winds of hate worked against me, tugging at the dinghy with unseasonable rage, their shrieking whistles turning to laughter in my head. Jericho’s ravings annoyed me to the point where it seemed Amaritude’s mean trick had affected me too. My passion was dying, or mutating into despising. ‘Fool!’ I told Jericho as he twitched in a rug at my feet while I piloted the dinghy through the dry storm. ‘What did you hope to achieve?’ I had to stop myself from kicking him.
Migalissin was in sight ahead when, without any warning, Jericho leapt up, threw himself from the side of the dinghy and ran like a rat up a lovewards hill, bleating fragmented invocations and scattering dry incense around him. He was gone before I could trigger the anchors.
I jumped down and stood in the road for while, feeling tired. Abruptly, the winds dropped. I was not surprised. I waited, straining my ears for a scream or a cry, but there was only silence. The branches of a petrified forest, which blanketed the hill, were unnaturally without creak or whisper. Occasionally, a feeling would eddy up inside me, and I nearly ran after Jericho, but the urges were fleet, purling away from me before I could act on them. I knew that I had lost him, and even should I find the body that had his name, the persona I cared for had long fled from it.
Evening came in a gentle blaze and I climbed back up onto the dinghy. It felt empty and strange to be there alone. I wanted to be sad or sickened, but could only be numb. Drizzle began to fall in a veil around me, making the deck greasy. Wide-winged black birds came out of the wood, uttering mad cries. I could only leave the area, go on. Jericho had gone to the angels, of this I was convinced. I hoped Amaritude would be kind to him, now that he had Jericho’s sanity closed in his shining fist.
In Migalissin, I paid for lodgings in a shack of a bar with the story of what I had experienced. An oily fire sputtered and hissed, offering the only light in the low-ceilinged saloon. I described Jericho as a fool, and felt angry about it. Only later, would I find the strength to weep.
When I had finished the story, I sat back to sip a mug of wine in the apparently awed silence of my audience. Then an old woman in a red kimono spoke up. ‘That is an astounding tale, although I have heard worse or stranger in my time. Still
, if I were you, I’d seek Amaritude’s favour quickly, in case any residue of his displeasure of your partner’s stupidity lingers around your vessel.’
I shuddered: the thought of addressing the Angel of Hate, for any reason, made me feel ill.
However, after two days of thinking about it, I performed a small, respectful ritual on and around the dinghy, even though I felt no liking for the Lord of the Hate Wind, and resented having to petition him myself. He made no appearance as I squeezed his favoured perfumes into the air, for which I was thankful. Hopefully, he has forgotten me now.
In the winter-time, I met Intempera at a festival. I had a new partner by then; a young girl with a great talent and a greater amount of impertinence, but her rather abrasive presence served to keep any lingering ghosts of Jericho at bay. I felt an unpleasant wrench in my heart when I recognised the voluptuous, statuesque shape strutting through the booths towards me, Loadstar in tow, but Intempera seemed delighted to see me. She told me she had disbanded the Excoriasts, in favour of a new troupe, comprising only sets of identical twins. ‘The variants were too unpredictable,’ she confided, grimacing. ‘Also, they would persist in contracting strange illnesses that I couldn’t treat. Often, they died.’
Later, over the familiar, lethal cocktails in Intempera’s wagon, I told her what had happened to Jericho. She expressed surprise, clearly having no idea that he had harboured a passion for the cidaris.
‘Well,’ she said, wrinkling up her nose and flapping a hand at me, ‘I should not be amazed! It is a pity you did not speak to me at Jasper’s about this.’
I sensed a profound meaning behind her words. ‘Why? Would it have made any difference?’
She shrugged. ‘It is hard to say, of course, and I’m even wary of telling you...’
‘Telling me what?’
‘They are famed for it!’ Intempera declared. ‘Variants, and the cidaris strain in particular, flirt and frolic around us human folk, and pretend arrogance, but it is known that having once shared a human bed, they are entrapped! They do not show it, of course, because they don’t see the need. But I have seen before what happens when a man - and it is generally men - falls for one of these creatures. Men cannot understand the ways of variants, and always feel rebuffed and used. Some even take sick on it. Whenever I come across a wretch in this condition, I always tell him that all he has to do is turn away from the object of his passion. Then, in almost all cases, the variant will develop a peculiar obsession and throw themselves at the feet of what they perceive to be a cold heart. If I had known about Jericho, I could have told you this. Your poor friend didn’t need to go invoking the Cruel and Shining Ones. He paid so dearly! What a waste.’
I don’t know how I felt after I’d heard her words. Perhaps my system was too shocked to organise itself to feel things. Instead, I took a sip of the evil liqueur, smiled and shrugged. ‘No matter. I could not have won, either way.’
Intempera raised her glass to me. ‘True. I hope you are now recovered from the incident.’
I nodded. ‘Yes, but I will never forget him,’ adding, ‘as he was at the beginning.’
And it is true.
The Feet, They Dance
It was the hands of the dead boy that first intrigued Grigor; slender, attenuated, lying in repose. They had not held anything in their long fingers for thousands of years. There was a hole in the rib cage beneath where they lay, as if in his last moments, the boy had sought to stem the life blood that had flowed away from him. Now, his face had sealed itself against the bones. He would not have been as gaunt as this in life, and yet, despite its desiccation, his face was still beautiful.
Grigor was the curator of the Middle Eastern section of the Museum of Man, an establishment full of death. Displayed in a glass case, beneath revealing lights, an Inca child was curled eternally into the position in which the frost had found her on a high South American mountain; in another section, blackened Egyptian mummies lay stretched in various stages of decomposition; in another, a misshapen male body, preserved by a peat bog, was curled up stiffly with his hands tied behind his back, his stone-like face still screaming. In these rooms were the rings and seals of long dead kings, the sandals of a martyred queen; the crabbed dismembered hand of a faithless concubine. Poison lay dried in fatal dishes, confined behind glass, and rusting weapons that had changed the destiny of forgotten kingdoms were held tight against display boards with metal and plastic. It was called the Museum of Man, but in truth it was the Museum of Greater Forces, and Man was rendered tiny as grubs before its power.
The mummy of the boy had arrived only the day before, and would provide the centre-piece for a themed exhibition, before Grigor and other physical anthropologists attempted to unravel the boy’s secrets. It was remarkable how well-preserved the body was. Grigor marvelled at the precise eyelashes, still lying against the polished cheek. The fingernails were perfect, as was the coppery hair, caught in a coil at the nape of the neck. Hoops of gold still adorned the boy’s ears, his throat collared by a necklace of golden leaves, his body swathed in the remnants of a dark blue robe, fringed and pleated. How could he look so peaceful when the cavern of his dreadful wound still screamed its evidence of violent death? Had he been a sacrifice or a victim of murder?
The boy had been named Nezzar, which was an approximation of the fragmented glyphs, found on a strip of linen laced between his hands. Nothing like this had ever been found before. His dating had proved difficult, the resulting data conflicting. All that was certain was that he’d lived between three and four thousand years ago, in the hot land where once Babylonia had spread its pageant over history. Some cynical voices had already been raised to suggest the mummy was a hoax, because mummification was not a process that had been favoured by the Mesopotamians, although the conditions under which it had been found had contributed to its preservation. A tell in Armenia had been excavated, and beneath it, a warren of tunnels and chambers, scoured by strange, subterranean winds that were hot and dry. Some said the chambers constituted an underground city, others that they were merely storage rooms for food, perhaps even catacombs. No other bodies had been found, however.
Nezzar was unique and mysterious, found alone in an unadorned sarcophagus in an empty room. For over two years, his existence had remained a closely-guarded secret, while anthropologists from around the world had worked to decipher the secrets of his parchment flesh. Then, the Museum of Man had secured the privilege of undertaking further tests. The Armenian authorities seemed to have surrendered him almost too readily. Were there rumours surrounding him? Had those who’d uncovered his remains been cursed, driven mad, killed, or had inexplicable events taken place in the establishments that housed the corpse? Grigor had not uncovered any rumours. He himself was not a superstitious creature, but he was charmed by the quaintness of its lore. He would not be afraid to undertake a midnight vigil with a cursed artefact, and would expect nothing to happen, but would still be disappointed if it didn’t.
As Grigor prowled around his dead prize, strange images came into his mind. He thought of dusty vaults, where splendid butterflies were arranged on pins and no-one came to view them. He thought of the distant lilt of female voices raised in ululating song. He thought of incense, fierce and potent, and fire-flies blinking against a sky, diminished by stars. He thought of dancing, stamping feet.
That evening, Grigor went back to his apartment late, as everyone had worked overtime to complete the new installation in the Middle Eastern rooms, where Nezzar was the central motif in a collection of ancient artefacts, all creatively arranged with discrete lighting. Grigor’s staff had gone out together for a celebratory drink, and his assistant, Nell, had tried to persuade him to join them. She was an acerbic young woman, who had cropped hair and chewed gum continually, her body forever slouching in chairs or shuffling through the lofty corridors of the museum. Her ragamuffin appearance, however, belied her firm academic background. She looked like a boy and had the body language of a boy. Grigor admire
d her greatly, although deferred to her sharp moods and was always a little frightened of her. He was grateful for her invitation to the staff gathering, but had intuited the sense of duty behind the words. He and Nell might spar together comfortably, but he knew that conversation would not flow so easily between the staff if he were part of the group. No, he was content to go home alone. He did not consider himself to be lonely; work consumed him. He was writing a book on the mysteries of ancient cultures, and any time not spent on jobs for the museum was donated to this task.
At home, Grigor collected his electronic mail - messages from physical anthropologists around the world - and then browsed through various internet forums on anthropology and archaeology to read the latest pronouncements about the mummy. Opinion was still divided. Grigor chuckled aloud to himself as he read them. No-one could explain Nezzar, he confounded all efforts to pin down his origins, as his tissues were capricious, refusing to obey the laws of nature. As yet, not even exposure to the poison-soaked air of the late twentieth century had succeeded in altering his composition. He was inviolate.
After consuming a modest supper, Grigor opened a bottle of red wine, put a CD of Turkish music on the stereo system in his living room and sat down with his two cats on the oversized sofa, which smelled musty and had clearly once belonged in a much larger room. This was true, because five years earlier, Grigor’s wife, Marigold, had told him their marriage of fifteen years was over, and that he would be leaving their home. They had both reached their mid-thirties, and Marigold was experiencing a rekindling of youthful vitality. Grigor, though handsome in a gaunt, cadaverous sort of way, was now too ascetic for her tastes. She had already found for him an apartment on the other side of town; not too far away to be inconvenient should she require something of him, but distant enough so as not to bump into him in the corner store. She had used the excuse of the division of spoils to refurnish the house, and Grigor had been allowed to take his pick of the remains. He’d submitted to his wife’s decrees in the same manner he’d dealt with every situation in their marriage; with quiet acquiescence, almost distraction. Marigold was annoyed he didn’t seem upset, but then he wasn’t. Grigor missed neither his home nor his wife. He’d brought his cats with him, and that was enough. In fact, he far preferred the solitude of the apartment, where he could play his favourite CDs of eastern music undisturbed. Marigold had detested them.