Lucia's Masks (7 page)

The boy was aware that the sight of his father’s corpse had muddied and slowed his thoughts and that he was probably in the state known as “shock.” His mind must be in turmoil, he told himself, compounded by grief and extreme fear. He was trying to be stoical and rational, as his father had taught him. The boy also knew he must seek his mother, regardless of what he found. She might still be alive, although he had no idea how he would cope or help her if she were badly wounded. He could strip off his clothes, he thought. He could make a tourniquet. He could call on Snake.

He got up slowly and quietly and surveyed the devastation to his right. What he saw brought him to his knees and shaped the word “horror” in his head. Only that single word, with its two vowels yawning like the gulfs of hell. In books in the Egg the boy had seen enough depictions of Hell’s busy landscapes to know what the monsters did to their victims, the proddings and roastings and unholy meals. His father had reassured him that these visions were not real. But the boy knew his father lied. He had a natural gift for spying out the comforting untruth. He understood that such lies enable humans to endure what is unendurable.

In a space where the smoke cleared, the boy saw three beasts doing something to his mother’s body that his mind simply could not bear. The sight sent a burning wire sizzling through his brain. Then a darkness mushroomed inside his skull. All he could see was a branching path in his head, flashing its urgent message. Fight or run. Could he fall upon the three monsters and save his mother? He was a slender boy of fourteen, only recently emerged from the Egg. He was unused to this world’s air which drained the strength from his limbs. His nerves calculated his chances. He swallowed the vomit in his gorge and ran.

Then Snake was with him again, whispering his urgent counsel. “Go,” Snake urged him. “Back to the hut!” The boy ran, a greedy self-love driving him on. In the rush of adrenalin that his lust for survival unleashed, the image of those dark figures at their foul work was for the moment obliterated.

Once again inside the Quonset hut, he collapsed and curled in on himself. He wanted oblivion and it eluded him. Part of him wanted death. He could not understand why he had been spared. Rational thought was agony but so too were the wounds that grief and wretchedness had torn open in his soul. He wanted to answer that sharp-toothed grief by tearing out his hair, and by wailing. Yes, he wanted to howl. Like the old king in Shakespeare’s play, half-naked on the heath, cursing the very mould that made the human form. An adolescent boy just out of the Egg, he understood — as he had thought never to understand — why an absolute hatred for humankind was justified. This must, he thought, with mounting dread and self-loathing, include himself. To be human was to be complicit in the deeds of those murderers who now crept and poked through the ruin they had made. What option had he but to howl, or slash at his face and chest with his nails? But even as he parted his lips to wail (which was an effort, because already they were parched and sore), Snake was at his ear. “Be silent,” Snake whispered. “Be silent, or you too will die.”

There was a split second when the boy’s decision hung in the balance. Why not embrace death? Why not join his mother and his father?

You still have me, foolish boy. Now do exactly as I say.

What Snake told him was to eat some clay from the dirt floor of the Quonset hut. The boy followed through, absurd and unsavoury as the instruction seemed. He dug into the earth with both hands and let the clammy substance ooze out between his fingers. Then he did as he was bid, squatting on his haunches in the half-dark. He ate of the clay, sparingly as instinct dictated, and the business of chewing and tasting soothed him and kept him silent. He fancied too, there was a power in the clay, telluric and mysterious, that steadied him and neutralized his rage and craven panic. Was it also a soporific? — for against all reason, he slept.

When he woke some hours later there was a bitter taste in his mouth and an unpleasant grittiness between his teeth. He got up and peered out the hut’s one window. As he counted the columns of smoke, the boy understood what a filthy temple the evil-doers had made. While he slept the fire had reduced his entire known world to ash. A thin blood-red line kept pulsing in his brain as he tried to absorb the fact he was now an orphan, cut off forever from the roots of his own flesh. He fell to his knees, with his face pressed into the clay floor.

“Eat,” Snake prompted him. So the boy chewed and spat, and chewed and spat, and the repetitive action comforted him a little. He began to weave himself a tale, to dispel fright and beguile time, as he had so often done in the Egg. He told himself he was new-made (for what other choice did he have?); that he was forged like the first man and first woman in stories of the world’s beginnings. He knew he needed a life myth to drive him on, and to protect him from the brazenly cruel beings who would see him as tender and untried, ripe for tormenting, or for murder. I am new-made, he told himself, as he stripped off his clothes and coated his entire body and face with a layer of clay. Then he stood in the centre of the Quonset hut, arms stretched out and legs wide apart, letting his new skin dry.

He dressed again slowly, to keep his clay covering intact and because his hands were trembling. “Time to run,” said Snake.

Sheer act of will got the boy to the hut door and beyond. Once outside, his eyes smarted. His knees buckled despite his best efforts. “Quickly,” said Snake. “Hurry!” Snake’s tongue lashed inside the boy’s ear to spur him on, far from the demons who still rummaged amongst the ruins. Were they cannibals? The boy was unsure. Snake said, “Do not look. To look would drive you mad.”

In this way the boy eluded madness and certain death. The wet clay of the earth and his loyal companion, Snake, were his saviours.

The boy ran for hours until at last he fell gasping at the foot of a massive oak, his small lungs aching, his breath like flame in his throat. As soon as he collapsed, the Hell-scape of the ruined Egg returned to torture him again. He saw his father’s dear, severed hand, and the villains’ obscene use of his mother’s body. He answered this torment in the only way he knew how; by grinding his forehead into the bark of the oak, lacerating his cheeks, and rubbing his chin raw. He wanted to flay himself, send up a bloody prayer and expiate what he feared was his cowardice. He yearned to find a way to lament all he had lost, including his innocence.

The oak was the first tree of substance he had ever encountered, and he saw it as the instrument of his punishment. Later, as he made his way through the living forest, begging Night to smother the pictures in his head, he believed he loathed all these tree-things with their insidious whispering leaves and rocking boughs. Mocking him. Their mesh of branches raked and twisted, stirring the air to create a song that struck him as both cruel and deranged. He feared this mad song of swishing branches and air would undo his struggle to stay sane. He recognized the source of this song. It was the question that would have the power to torment him all his life. Was she already dead? Was his mother dead when those devil-men did those things to her?

He willed himself to walk rapidly through the swirling wood. All the while the blood oozing from his wounds congealed. By morning he made a piteous sight. A woman who saw him screamed. She was one of the nomadic People of the Silk who named themselves for the tents in which they lived, made of parachute silk. They cherished this silk. If ever it was ripped, they experienced the rent as a sharp pain under the breastbone. This was why the Seamstress was the chief of their tribe. Her stitching had the delicacy of a moth’s wing. She healed wounds in silk.

The boy’s first sight of the row of tents was at dawn. The sheer fabric drank down the sunrise’s amber and ashes of roses. So tautly was the silk fastened to the frames and to the ground that the fabric vibrated in its confinement. He saw the triangular tents as live, pure forms, rimmed in palest fire. Briefly he was lifted aloft on their dazzling points. They danced in his mind’s eye and he with them. The dance cleared a blessed space. There was, for a moment, no ruined Egg and no horrific spillage.

Until a woman screamed. What she saw was a refugee from that Hell-scape he had fled. He was white as paper, streaked with gore. The woman saw a death’s head who came as a harbinger of plague.

A second woman appeared: Miriam, the camp’s healer. With her was a huge man who made the boy think of the stories of Goliath and of Enkidu. This giant came at him, shaking his fists and growling. The boy had no strength to run. Kill me, he thought. I am emptied now of everything. Then he felt the woman’s arms around him and he began to shake. He heard her shouting, but not at him. She was telling the giant to go away.

Miriam took the boy into her tent, where he still could not stop shaking. His teeth struck each other so sharply she feared he was having a fit. She lay down with him, and drew him in toward her so that his head was cradled between her soft breasts. She was happy to cradle him and bring him comfort.

In her City life, Miriam had been a midwife, and had forsaken her profession because twice she had to kill the life she helped to deliver. She had acted swiftly, pressing a cloth soaked in chloroform to what would have been a face, had the child (but was it a child?) had features. In both cases, there were no eyes, no ears, no nostrils. Miriam was a woman of finely honed compassion. She told herself it was mercy guiding her murderous hand. She imagined the life these beings would have, and knew she had no choice but to save them from their own futures. She buried the bodies with same dispatch she had extinguished their breath and told the mothers comforting lies of stillbirths. Then she turned her back on the City forever. She walked until her feet bled. Her guilt was a rancid stink that clung to her. She was distraught and near despair.

One morning she had come upon the clean array of the tents, with their luminous membrane-thin silk shuddering in the breeze. The flap of the central tent was pinned back. Miriam was drawn to the enfolding dusk of its interior. It was as if she were mesmerized by the heart of a jewel. In this tent the Seamstress was waiting. Miriam bowed at her feet. When the Seamstress’s hands cupped her head, she felt the full force of a blessing that cancelled her guilt. When she stood up, she had no doubt as to her role. She would be the camp’s healer. Her skills would flower among the People of the Silk.

She lanced boils, plucked out thorns and slivers and leeches, made herbal potions to ease aching bellies, heads and backs. The first time she attended a birth, her hands shook. The sweat of fear was a runnel between her breasts. The baby was perfect. Miriam wept.

She wept again when she bathed the wounds of the adolescent boy who had stumbled into their camp, because he was so perfect; his slight ivory body, tender and trusting. His face (as though his mother had dreamed him) was one that often appears in the frescoes of Italy. He had a Renaissance face. Miriam was shaken by his beauty, which she discerned even through the wounds he had inflicted on himself. She locked her strong legs about his body to help stop his trembling. And so it came about, as she rocked him with her body and hummed softly in his ear, that his sex rose and hardened. Miriam lifted her skirt and took him inside her. The orgasm, she thought, would help him sleep. And besides, she desired him.

In this way, the boy found a mother and a lover simultaneously.

This situation could not last. Theirs was a relationship too purely archetypal and too fraught with pitfalls to last. One of those pitfalls came in the form of Vulcan, the giant. The People of the Silk called him their Maker, because this massive man fashioned their tent pegs and frames. He was equally adept working with wood or what little metal they had. He mended pots and carts and the palanquin on which they transported the ancient Seamstress when they moved camp.

Miriam had once taken the Maker to her bed — initially out of desire, and later out of pity. But she reached a point where she could no longer tolerate his idea of lovemaking: his body the hammer and hers the anvil. Although she had encouraged him, he seemed incapable of learning other ways. After a time she came to loathe his smell of metal and sour sweat. She put him off gently. She hoped his common sense would prevail. Strong passions, she cautioned him, other than reverence for the silk and the Seamstress, would tear apart the tissue of the group’s bonding.

There was a resolute discipline amongst the Silk People, its rule not so much defined as absorbed from the Seamstress’s example. Her slight form, spare and functional as one of her own treasured needles, radiated purpose. Her age was a mystery, as were her origins. The fact she grappled daily with excruciating pain was not. Every one of the Silk People recognized and reverenced the ferocious determination the Seamstress brought to boring a channel through her agony. There were times it hurt them to look at her hands, clenched against her breastbone like claws. They watched amazed and relieved as she applied the fire of her will to her disobedient nerves so that she could carry on, mending any tears in the tents’ delicate fabric. Her fingers unknotted, flexed, then fluttered, became birds in the air. This was no legerdemain. The Silk People saw the Seamstress’s breath catch and her cheek pale. They knew the wrench of self-discipline this miracle cost her.

The Seamstress was their icon, and even the Maker was awed by her powers. For her sake and for the sake of the group, he wrestled with his rampant lust for Miriam. But because the gangly boy Miriam had taken to her tent was not properly one of the People of the Silk, the Maker did not put up the least fight against his jealousy of this pale, mute adolescent. His hatred of the boy was absolute, as dense as the point of the blade he pressed one night to the base of the young interloper’s spine. The Maker drew the knife over each of the boy’s knobby vertebrae, leaving behind the barest crimson thread that culminated in an upward flick under his left ear lobe. It was the same ear lobe that Miriam had punctured at the boy’s request so that she could insert one of her own cut-glass earrings.