The Vorrh (3 page)

The cave’s bare interior seemed at once empty and brimming with occupation. I curl into the sanctity of this most human shelf, and taste the joy of its simplicity with the edge of my sudden tiredness.

The thunder enters my sleep. It slides between the laminations of dreams with the grace of a panther, its first sound being no more than a whisper or a vibration. Each mile it runs it gains volume and power, each mile it flies it trains my unconscious to not respond, each growing resonance being only fractionally louder than the last. The hours are eaten in its stealthy approach, my nightmares absorbing the shocks until it is directly overhead and its massive percussion shakes the ground with light; a huge whiteness, battering the pale morning with a fury that refuses all kinship.

The village is awake and active, people darting from one house to another as the sky opens and torrents of rain fall to meet the rising earth’s unbridled appetite. Within minutes, the fields have drunk deep and are forming lakes. The streets and tracks of the village are alive with rivulets and yellow tributaries of fast water. The villagers fall upon these eddies with a great frenzy of action. Rolled-up sacks and hessian are used to divert the flood into wells and gulleys which lead to other cisterns. Logs and stones, even items of clothing, are improvised to divert this precious storm. The feuds and squabbles that fossilised the village are forgotten, water and its capture going beyond blood and its boundaries. The rain is constant and spiteful, the villagers are determined and drenched with mud. People slither and run, shout instructions to the very young, scream for more sacks, laugh and fall with the very old, who curse. Those who are normally locked away join the rush, limping and screaming with exhilaration and confusion. The entire village turns into mud beings, a chaotic, purposeful mania rattling under the rains. Some animals watch from their stables and doorways, surprised and indignant at so much energy, water and noise.

I can not stay outside of this circus vortex, so I carefully stash the bow and other goods high in the cave, away from the flood and beasts, and run to work alongside a toothless elder who is trying to build a dam of rocks and rags.

His efforts are useless against the power of the flow. His slowness
gives a pathetic humour to the event, and his wall tumbles away every few minutes while he methodically continues to pile, seemingly unaware of the gleeful water and his mechanical futility. Together, we manage to turn the stream, sending it into the corner of the courtyard. It pours into the mouth of an open well, and falls into its resounding depth with echoing splashes. As I watch our minor triumph, in a flash it occurs to me that I have no memory of Este bleeding, no picture of the blood leaving her body, just a vague blur of its presence drying everywhere in the room. Have these sounds caught a reflection, cupped the act in a palm of memory?

The old man tugs at my sleeve and clears my vision. He has started work on another stream and needs my help. We continue directing the water for two hours, soaked to the bone but satisfied. The storm passes, the rain stops and the steaming earth has begun to dry. Birds noisily make use of the orange puddles before they return to dust. A saturated heat begins to rise, forcing all labour to cease.

The family of the old man insist I join them in their dripping home. Our celebratory feast is simple but powerful: we drink a coarse red wine made from the family’s parched, hard grapes and eat a dish of fat rice and dark meat cooked in pomegranate juice, punctuated by delicious bread with black onions baked into its crust. There is much merriment and we share that language of need and alcohol, where the native and the foreign are overrun by excitement, and delicacies of grammar are jolted loose by emotion.

The old man concentrates on his food as if it were his last. I make some slight comment of jest about this, and am carefully told that the rains and the old have a special relationship in this land. I had heard rumour of this before, but our isolation had kept most things at a distance; our contact with the neighbouring communities had been remote. But the spring rain ritual is true, and my host explains its necessity and the intricacies of its operation between mouthfuls of food and wine.

The old are a burden on their poor economy, becoming increasingly incapable of work. So, once past their useful stage, they are given to the mercy of the spring gods and placed outside their homes with food and drink for three days. At that time of year, the rains are soft and constant, very unlike the autumn deluge we had just suffered. They would sit in silence, knowing that conversation or pleading would not help their condition; better to save strength. After their allotted time, they are welcomed back inside and returned to their anxious beds. They understand that this was a more civilised and kinder test than those conducted by their forefathers. In those distant days of famine, the old had been taken to steep cliffs and forced to find their own way home, the Gods growing fat on their torn and fractured remains.

A quarter of the old will die during the coming weeks; night chills, influenza or phenomena being the divine intervention. The rest will be celebrated, fed and honoured for another year. The old father cleaning his plate with his last scrap of bread has survived six spring rains, and has the intention of surviving many more.

In the afternoon, I say my farewells and return to my cave, where I sleep a peaceful and dreamless journey.

* * *

Far to the south, twilight was tasting the air. Swallows darted and looped in the invisible fields of rising insects, restless arrowheads spinning in the amber sunlight. One moment, black silhouette, iron age. The next, tilting to catch the sun, flashing deep orange, bronze age. Dipping and rotating in giddying time: iron age, bronze age, iron age.

Watching them were the yellow eyes of a lone black man who sat on the mud parapet wall of a colonial stockade. He watched and attempted
to gauge their distance and speed, making abstract calculations across the infinite depth of sky, a solemn assessment of range and trajectory for a shot that could never be made. Across his knees lay his Lee-Enfield rifle, a bolt-action firearm of legendary durability, in perfect working condition and untouched by any other hand since he was given it in his early manhood. He still remembered first grasping its solid weight and the smell of the brown, oiled paper it was wrapped in. The excitement of possession, matched by his pride at becoming a member of the bush police. That was forty-two years ago, and now Tsungali was beginning to feel the old rifle grow heavy again.

He and the gun bore cuneiform scars and indentations. They had been written into. Prophecies and charms marked his face, talismans against attack from animals, demons and men. The butt of the Enfield was inscribed against touch or loss, and for accuracy and courage; it also carried the tally of the twenty-three men and three demons it had officially dispatched. Tsungali had not worked for the police or the British army for many years. The Possession Wars had made him an outcast from the authorities, and far too much blood had been shed to divide the beliefs of both sides. So he was confused and disturbed at being called for, summoned to the enclosure he had known so well and loved as home, the same compound he had seen turned into the bitter kraal of his enemies.

They had come looking for him, not with troops, shackles and threats like before, but quietly, sending soft, curved words ahead that he was needed again. They wanted to talk and forget the crimes of before. He had smelt this as a trick and set about carving new protections, constructing cruel and vicious physical and psychic traps about his house and land. He spoke to his bullets and fed them until they were fat, ripe and impatient. He waited in docile cunning for their arrival, which had proved to be calm, dignified, and almost respectful. Now he sat and waited to be ushered into the fort’s headquarters, not knowing why he was there and surprised at his own obedience. He was shocked at the scent of homecoming which
befuddled his warrior’s instinct. He gripped the Enfield to fence it off, and used the swallows to gain focus before, during and after the event. He bled their speed into his anticipation, as the fierceness of the stars took command of the darkening sky.

* * *

I set my path by the night and walk out of the village while the track remains luminous. Later, starlight will make it shine in a different way, polishing the miles ahead with a bright, invisible velocity.

I walk between banked walls of white stone as if in a riverbed, the road hollowed out by time, weather and the continual passage of humans, migratory as birds. Tribes crossing and re-crossing the same gulley, desperately trying to draw a line against extinction. It is with this herd of ghosts that I travel, alone.

After some hours, I am stopped by an anxiety of sight. I have been aware for some time of tiny movements in the edges of my vision, fish-like punctuations breaking the solid wave of stone on either side, catching the light in dim flashes for less than a blink. Every time I stop, the phenomenon ceases. When I continue, the glinting peripheral shoal follows me. There is wonder at first, but it had now turned to unease, and I fear sentience or hallucination. Neither is wanted at this time: I seek only loneliness and distance, not wanting association or introspection, it being necessary to seek one dimension to understand with clarity. I have been crippled by complexity before, and the healing from it had taken too many years. I will not go there again and share my being with all those others who would claim and squabble over my loyalty. I need only to breathe and walk, but at this time of night, in that albino artery, I hear fear tracking me.

The bow comes to my hand, wand-like and unstrung. She gives off musk into my grip, and her chemical blade reaches my pounding heart, which has also turned white, but away from stone. It touches my mind like her tongue, and I become calm and weightless, ready for the attack. Nothing happens. I stand, still as a post. After a time, I tilt my head slightly to see if anything moves. At first nothing, then a flicker, a single, tiny glimmer. I focus on this sprite, and move towards it in the manner of a cat stalking a sound. It is not in the air, but in the white stone. I can see it embedded in its cretaceous library. Starlight has ignited it, and a resonance of dim brilliance quivers about its edge. It is a fossilised shark’s tooth, a small, smooth dagger encrusted into the stone, its edges bitterly serrated and gnawing against the distant celestial light. There are hundreds of them stippling the rock.

It was my movement between them which had rattled their light to give the impression of motion. These teeth were once greatly prized and, as I recall, had offered a small industry to the local inhabitants, who dug them out and exported them to political cities where they were mounted in silver and hung in a cluster on a miniature baroque tree. It was called a credenza, a name that became synonymous with the side table that once held it. The Borgazis and the Medici owned rich and sumptuous versions. When a guest was given wine, he or she was shown to the tree, where they freely picked a tooth and placed it in their chalice, its delicate chain hooked over the rim. If the tooth turned black, the wine was poisoned; if it stayed unstained, the credence of the wine and the host was proven and business and friendship could commence.

I stand in the black night, musing on distant tables and forgotten aggressions, in a stone river of teeth, some of which I can use; their compact hardness and perfect jagged edges would make excellent arrowheads. In the approaching morning, I will dig them out and clean them, find straight wood for the shafts and hunt swallows; their wings
will be my fletching. The wings are only perfect when cut from the bird alive, so I will have to make nets to trap their speed.

* * *

The officer hated this place, hated the forces that made it work so brilliantly in opposition to all that was sensible and ordered. He was driven into the fort twice a week to set its business straight before returning to the centre of one of the more civilised townships. He knew that every plan or order he made would be reversed or inverted, and that this act was not mischievous or malicious, but simply the process of translation, the negotiation of opposites; not to find compromise, but to ritualise the act of meaningless exchange. It infuriatingly proved that the world was made in at least two different ways. If he were to ever truly know how many different ways, he may have run screaming from his post and returned to the sanctity of the linear cities, even to the common values of the linear trench. He had survived that relentless war, and had been rewarded for it. But this commission on another continent had proved to be a biblical reward: tricky, blind and ultimate.

The task he was now undertaking was a perfect example of managing the inexplicable, a distasteful confrontation with a set of primitive values. He had been told to use persuasion and guile to achieve the outcome. He preferred force, but it was proven not to work here, and could produce the opposite effect.

The Possession Wars were evidence of that, and the man outside had been a leader in that bloody uprising. He tried not to think about that, about the dead, the stupidity and the waste and the fact that everything now was just the same. He would have hanged the man outside for treachery and murder, for betraying the position of responsibility given
to him, violently selling it out over a mistake, and for arrogantly mixing ignorance with shabby, meaningless superstition and boiling these to outrage. Over three days, a peaceful and obedient community had turned into an inflamed, rampant mob. The church and school burnt down. The resident officers butchered in their astonishment, radio equipment torn to pieces. The airstrip and the cricket pitch had been erased, scrubbed out. Not a single straight line was allowed to exist anywhere.

By the time he and a heavily armed division had arrived, they found a squalid churn of destruction. Everything that had been achieved with, or given to, the natives had been intentionally eradicated, mangled back into their own stinking, senseless history. Tsungali stood at the centre of the carnage, triumphant and exhilarated, wearing only his tunic jacket and his peak cap, ridiculously turned inside out. Feathers, bones and cartridges were entangled in his hair and his teeth had been re-sharpened.