Celebrant (18 page)

This finishes occurring to him as he enters the passageway he had been aiming for all along and, while it does cause him to falter a single step, he charges on, vaguely telling himself he might go back in any case.
His breath rebounds from the walls, plainer and plainer as the drone of the machine behind him fades.

*

A wet-looking sky, like fresh water color, blue and the scallops of the crater shadows on the moon.
The ground is yellow, not stony but bunched up in clods like a nubby wool blanket.
In places the ground trembles occasionally, as though shivering with cold.
But the air is tepid, still, and feels like a bath.
deKlend breathes it with relish, feeling released under the open sky.
The level horizon seems too close.
There’s a brambly tree standing nearby, emerging rather, out of a dense whorl of roots like a nest.

Everything is listening.
The only sound is shallow breathing between land and sky, and no motion.
Turning up the yellow soil with the toe of his shoe uncovers faint pink and orange ribbons of fine-grained sand.
deKlend sits down there where he came to earth a moment before, however that is understood, and homelessly gazes around him, hugging his knees.
There is a tangle of fractures in the distance that must be more trees.
One has little black beads in it
—
small birds.
Motionless, they hop among the boughs.
He can see them clearly against the sky, little points like musical notation.
Gradually he begins to hear the moon’s descent toward the horizon, a nearly silent inhalation.

A sinuous, fluorescent line appears along the sky, trailing a vaporous curtain of light.
The light wavers nervously, like a clear veil rippling with delicate, luminous colors that sweep slowly across the sky and drain into the earth.
Following their descent, deKlend sees that he is crawling with what looks like heat turbulence, but he is not hot nor does he feel anything at all unusual.
Just above the ground, the sky’s effulgence forms long elastic funnels, swaying, as though the countryside were ablaze.
Now the glow hovers like a film on the surface of water, seen from below.
All around him and on his own body deKlend can see a shimmer of nearly invisible vortices of diverse sizes coiling into every object, and some coils within coils forming onion shells, rolling their hips.
These are gravity fields.
They don’t radiate from objects.
They inundate into objects.
They appear and disappear in what seem to be the same places as deKlend alters the focus of his eyes, and once he feels something like a muscular cramp in his irises and gasps as, for a moment, it seems the whole landscape is filled with whirling pitchers of smoke.

After numerous experiments he can find no way to affect them.

But I’m not hallucinating (he thinks)
These are nothing at all like any hallucinations I’ve ever had.

A giant shadow bulges into the membrane covering the sky, and deKlend feels as though he were being sucked up by the hair, so faintly he probably wouldn’t have noticed if it hadn’t coincided with the appearance of that opalescent black obscurity overhead.
He feels like a rubber band that has been just a little drawn out, and the very top of his skull tickles.
The shadow collapses, and the odd sensations go with it.
The membrane he now sees is all throughout itself fissured with black imbrications and folds, like loops of calligraphy that squeeze and flex on a drowsily undulating surface.

Blinking and casting about himself, deKlend watches the vortices.
He falls asleep.

deKlend wakes again with the impression he’s been sleeping a long while.
But the night around him is exactly the same.
The moon is just where it was.
deKlend rises stiffly.

I can’t have slept through the day (he thinks) and into the following night.
I must have fallen into one of those prevaricating sleeps that engulf one so totally, and into which one plunges so precipitously and deeply all at once, that they seem a lot profounder than they really are.
They take up more time than they last.

deKlend knocks the fine yellow dust from his body and begins to walk.
The sky has resumed its previous, freshly-painted appearance, but with dim explosions of vivid color that burst and fade like cold, sparkless fireworks.
Now and then, a vortex flickers up from a stone or other remarkable object, like a single, skinny tongue of flame flicking from a bed of embers.
Otherwise, his vision is as it was.

I seem to have forgotten that I have a good reason for being here (deKlend thinks).
But it may have changed since I arrived.
I didn’t know what to expect, before I came, and now that I am here, I still don’t know what to expect.
I know that I am led on
—
that I must make my way somehow to Votu on the endless earth, that I must make my sword and bring it there, and I must learn about mnemosem, or that is I must first discover what is it mnemosem and then
—
?

—
Make my
sword?

deKlend wracks his brains
—
I don’t remember anything about
swords
.

...
and yet this idea comes to me with subtle indications of being a conviction.
Of mine.

So this maybe is one of those ideas that is neither exhaled by the mind, in the normally mysterious way, which is a kind of trade secret in the production of everyday ideas, kept from me by the obscurity of the complexity, and darkness, of the production process, nor is it, I suspect, an idea I’ve learned from anyone else.
It doesn’t have a return address.
This is the kind of idea that one just finds there, in some mind at hand.
I imagine a curator who checks a sealed collection, a set of items locked away for decades, and finds an uncatalogued thing unaccountably mixed in with them.
It has always been there, and it seems almost as if it weren’t really there.
But there it is, that idea
—
I must bring to Votu a sword that I have made.
The old fantasy of a sword.
They said, when I was young, that those as makes swords has fits.

I’ll make a sword (he decides) and then I’ll have it.
That way (he thinks) I’ll be covered.

Covered how?

By having one.
Whether or not I have any use for it.

deKlend stops thinking.

He hears crickets, and walks in among the thicket of shadows thrown on the ground by high myrtle trees.
An enormous black bird swoops by without a sound.
The air smells like herbs.

The shadows lengthen into streets.
Empty streets.
deKlend hears singing.
The houses are made of pale brown adobe with dark wooden beams and shutters.
The moon’s light falls directly to the ground and shudders.
It passes the houses without shining on them, so they have no gleaming outlines, but are visible by their own colors.
The street is made of uniform, compacted gravel that doesn’t crunch, the little stones are mottled indigo and white and walking on them his feet make no more sound than if they were grains of sand.
Broad and gently rounded as the back of a whale, the street is dimly vibrating in the night like static, although the night, which must be dark, does not seem dark.
In the dark, everything is distinct.

The singing comes from all around him.
There is quiet drumming accompanying it.
The singing is not insistent, the lines alternate long and short, in men’s voices, solemn, lively, and calm.
He doesn’t recognize the language.

I’m invisible (deKlend thinks suddenly), and they are invisible to me.
This town might be full of life and light that is hidden from me as I come into it from outside.

He gazes around him and sees only houses, still air.
There are a few trees.
Crickets.

This town is full of life and light (he thinks)

He goes through a wide open door, into one of the houses.
It smells like a linen closet.
People are going to and fro in the darkened house in silence, lost in thought.
They take short steps and their heads sway a little from side to side as they walk, avoiding bumping into each other but not avoiding contact.
A figure steps through a wide doorway, the head a blot of shadow against the glowing wall, absorbed by the mass of darkness in the hall before him.
White shirts dwindle away in the clear gloom, fish sinking into murky water.
deKlend follows them through thin hallways whose walls are lined with doorways shoulder to shoulder, all open.
He turns corners from one narrow doorway to another, in among the milling people, shadow skin and incandescent white shirt, ghostly jostling, to-and-fro in and otu I mean out of the doorways.
The floorboards creak, heels tump the floor, clothing rustles.

They are all preoccupied.
Listening to the singing, lost in thought, found in the song.
deKlend steps down quickly into an atrium where the singers stand near the garden wall, with their heads above the level of the wall and lost in the sky.
They sway, turning their waists or stepping very lightly from side to side, and from time to time their motions bring their heads down slightly so that fractions of their silhouettes show against the wall’s moonslab.
Some play small drums and others clap their foggy hands.
The singing is no louder, no more immediately coming from any particular direction.
Listening to it, deKlend feels more and more peaceful, but perhaps that would be different if he understood the words.
They sing without being entranced songs they’ve obviously sung forever.
Singing lively and solemn, echoes carry out the remains of each word like servants clearing away the leftovers.

The invisible observer suddenly becomes visible
—

Abruptly revealed, deKlend flees the house, pursued only by himself.
He runs as fast as he can, throwing panic-stricken looks over his shoulder at the tranquil street behind him.

Rounding a corner he sidesteps into an alley between a low wall and the pot belly of a small house, against which he presses his back and the palms of his hands.
Silence includes the faint song, crickets too, excludes only the harsh grating of his breath.
An owl actually hoots.
A moment later, his shadow jogs by in the street.
It misses him.

deKlend cranes his ears after the noiseless feet.
In front of him, on the other side of a low fence of cement blocks, are plants that hold themselves relaxed and erect, drinking soberly in the dark.
Climbing over, deKlend thinks he’ll hide among them
—
then halfway he is brought up short by a flash, watching from under the fronds as his shadow, standing in the street, peers at him over the fence.
deKlend changes his mind and hurries down the alley instead, pausing at the other end.
A voice speaks to him.
A woman’s gently marvelling voice, speaking a quiet exclamation that disperses in space like an X of perfume.
It is there, too close behind him.
Immediately.