CHAPTER TWENTY
The spirit voices told Tyc to split them and keep both alive. Although there was much less of their sacred one, he obviously had all the power and soul of life. The other was nothing but a head on a withered stick—a puppet, a ghost coat of a man. So she assumed that Oneofthewilliams wanted it kept alive out of pity and some unknown loyalty. But as time moved on and she saw more and more of them, she began to change her mind. Slowly, bit by bit, she suspected that it might be spite. To keep the fragment of a man alive so that it might be aware daily of its miserable demise, its worthless attachment to the world of the living.
Oneofthewilliams was quiet and powerful in his hut. He was carried out every day to the sea. To touch it and hold the sand. Or to the edge of the Vorrh where he fingered the leaves. He had the arms and hands to do so, and they were expressive and fluent even though some fingers had been lost during his arrival. He did not need legs anymore, nor did he need a mouth, eyes and ears, or any other part of the face or head that tasted and commented on the outside world. His extended neck had what it needed, swollen and solidly bound to it. Mostly hindbrain and inner cortex. The Wassidrus got the frontal lobes, all the memories, the eyes, and the facial parts that made the voice work. Unfortunately, that was the only organ that was not healing properly. The most surprising to Tyc was the heart and the spine. Oneofthewilliams had told her how to do it and it had sounded like madness, but it worked so far. The hollowed bamboo and the wildebeest heart sewn into the demon half of the rib cage. The sad human heart lived in the sacred one. It was scarred and doubtful and occasionally it needed to be massaged through the thin walls of skin and fascia that made a lumpen drumskin over it.
In an afternoon that was filled with noise the Wassidrus opened his eyes to the gentle touches and not-so-gentle probes that he had been experiencing for the last twenty minutes or so. Outside, the children were playing and the wives were laughing and shouting at one another from across the sun-bleached yard where they gutted fish, standing at separate tables. There was a great optimism, bright in the bright air. The prone figure opened his eyes, still expecting to see his imagined arms warding off the intrusions of his dream. But this was no dream. It was a nightmare of reality, because the only hands and arms he found were those that were engaged in the real act of touching him all over, and they had once been his. For perched opposite him was his bisected other half, being held on the bed by the strong arms of two servants in blinding yellow robes. There were so many arms that he became confused, and the lack of any to use himself was intolerable. For a moment, still bleary-eyed, he thought he was in the presence of some octopus being or a Shiva or Kali deity. It was only when he recognised what used to be him feeling where his genitals should have been did he become truly awake and stare at the thing before him. The servants held it because if they had let go it would have rolled off the bed. It had no legs and rested on a kind of built-in pillow under its fragment of skinny rib cage. He was reminded of a toy he had once seen in a birdcage in the house of one of the higher members of the Timber Guild. A small ivory man with a rounded bottom and a carved laughing face. It was there to keep the caged bird amused. Having nowhere to fly, nothing to fuck, and even less to sing about, the demented creature could only eat and “play” with this toy on the shit-stained floor of its gilded prison. The insane bird would continually attack the grinning effigy of its jailers, pecking the resilient bone with all its might, butting it with vicious purpose. The figure rolled over on its half-spherical weighted base and then rolled back up again, causing the screeching creature to attack again in a greater rage. This little repetition could last for hours until the bird was exhausted, the painted mouth of the figure still grinning. The thing that lolloped forward to touch him again had the same balance as the torturous toy. But no smiling face. It had no face at all. From above the oddly broad shoulders and the sickeningly familiar arms, the neck rose and thickened out to a flat lopsided appendage that looked like a badly made beret or the cap of a shrivelled mushroom. A thick binding of the same yellow material that the servants wore seemed to keep it all in place. Why did he see this all so well and recognise it as once being part of him? This thing obviously saw nothing and looked as if it barely had consciousness at all. What could possibly exist and function in that socklike vestige of brain? Why had he been given all the senses? All the memories? He groaned it as a question mainly to himself. At the sound, the servants lifted the body off the bed and set it on the ground at a safe distance. The fingers of the thing instantly sought the offered palm of the right-hand servant. They skipped across his open hand like an electrified spider, the servant nodding all the while. He then bellowed out a name. And after a moment or two an almost naked child entered the hut. The servant spoke quickly with pronounced effort. The now-serious child turned towards the bed and approached. He looked at the Wassidrus and said, “Oneofthewilliams is telling you that in some soon days you will be well enough to leave and never return.”
There was a no answer to give, what could be said? The hands moved again, making forms and shapes in space, and tapped out understanding to the nodding servant, who whispered to the child.
The solemn child again turned and spoke.
“The sacred one says you will have a servant to feed and carry you from place to place and that you have already met him before.”
There was a blockage of the light in the door as another entered; a large bald man came before him. He bowed towards Oneofthewilliams and the child spoke to him very slowly. The response was totally unexpected and seemed nauseously out of place. The large man started giggling uncontrollably and spoke a few unintelligible words in a voice that belonged to a young girl. All eyes now turned towards the Wassidrus. The sacred one made a final gesture of opening his hands and the child said, “This is Kippa. You once tried to kill him. Perhaps now you will be nicer.”
Apart from the love of his unknown daughter, Oneofthewilliams shivered out a great mass of other information, including that of another holy man. Father Lutchen was an old man with many truths and many lies, equally skilled in the wisdom and treachery of magic, who lived in the crime called Essenwald. He had tried to harm Modesta. This man should be punished to the same level as Father Timothy should be celebrated and sent home.
Two warriors who had experience outside the tribe were given the task of retrieving Father Lutchen. Tyc explained to them that they wanted him alive. They were given the tribal name of Essenwald and a scent of his whereabouts there.
Mumt’r and Blincc took the commission eagerly, knowing the wisdom of being in praise and the penalty of being in failure. They were paddling hard towards the white man’s town, without a doubt or a question. They chatted and bounced on the waves of their esteemed journey. They came in through the river that is shadowed by high gaunt cliffs. The water here was fast and occasionally ran shallow over flinty pebbles. Their sea canoe was not prepared for such inconsistencies and many times they had to step out of it and guide its considerable weight to deeper waters. They walked through the same shallows where the assassin Tsungali attacked Peter Williams. They passed under the humpbacked bridge and its row of disreputable cottages. They paddled until they smelt the city around the next bend. They stopped, holding the boat against the pull of the water with backward strokes of their oars while their silent eyes assessed the situation ahead. Then without a word they made for the shore, found a beach with long reeds nearby, and hid the canoe, fastening it with pegs and ropes and stealing charms. They gathered their weapons and found the path. The previous humour that had driven them through the bobbing water was now gone. The path still swayed with the motion of the water as they adjusted their land legs and walked to do the serious business in the alien hive of stones that loomed ahead them.
Old Father Lutchen sat gloomily looking at the model of the Adam automata that the Valdemar brothers had made to hug the city’s guillotine. He touched the small model of the ingenious articulation of the wooden leaves that triggered the terrible axe. It had been instigated by his influence, the same way that he had compelled them to design and construct the cathedral window. He had also instigated and coaxed their even more sublime work in the Chapel of the Desert Fathers. And now it had all changed, their path deviated to corruption and blasphemy. True, it was he who had brought the desire of the Timber Guild and the city’s authorities to their attention and consideration. But he had expected that they might have conjured and designed an instrument of compassion and calm to aid and soften the continual grim action of the municipal guillotine. He never dreamt that they would create such a device. A machine worse than the mechanical axe itself. The monstrous automata they had devised was an outrage of biblical lore that extended the sufferings of the convicted felon while dragging even greater crowds in to gawp at the sickening act. It wasn’t guilt that he felt; he had given up that mockery of emotions years ago. It was how his part, his manipulation, had become so deformed. This was the work of the subconscious mind that he thought he’d had under control. After the execution of Ishmael Williams, he had washed his hands of anything to do with the Adam machine, denied ever speaking about its conception, construction, and operation.
This had ostracised him from the company of the brothers long before the abomination was first put into practice. He no longer felt comfortable with them. The last evening he had brought his singing glasses to their workshop was a disaster. Of course they let him play, but after only a few minutes his wet finger could not keep up with the innuendoes of minor notes, the inflections of doubt and pause that slid in under the clarity of his firmness. He saw the creak in the mouth of the younger brothers and knew that he had become a joke to them. The intimate resonant language of their previous exchanges were slapped aside, nothing remained, and he stopped his regular visits. Since then he had seen them only in church, where they were aloof, indifferent, and embarrassed.
Then the case came. The brothers brought it to his door.
“Father Lutchen, we have made this for you.”
They removed the packing and the restraining bolts and put the wooden casing aside. The brothers opened the curved hood that protected the line of glass bowls that diminished in size as they continued along the length of the spindle on which they were threaded.
The bowls sat above a curved lead trough that was being filled with water by Ernst, the eldest Valdemar brother. Each curved glass touched the fluid. The spindle was connected to a treadle mechanism below, so that the action of the player’s foot would send the bowls spinning through the water and allow both of the player’s hands to finger the lubricated vibrating glass. They stood back so Lutchen could see their fine handiwork. The old man just looked at it and recognised it as an instrument of isolation. Of solo separation. He thanked them and was surprised that they did not leave.
“Will you play it?” said Walter, the younger brother.
Lutchen was confused.
“We hope you might play it with us and take up the counter-harmony.”
The old man was amazed; the instrument was a crafted bridge, a way back into the company that he so sadly missed. The only intelligent company in Essenwald that he could master. This gift was an orchestra in comparison to the simple tuned glasses he had given them, and he could not wait to hear it sing in their company. And this also meant he was closer to initiating them into the esoteric mysteries of sonic prayer and the door that it opened onto the core of many different religious beliefs.
Their playing together could counterbalance the perverted quality of their last invention and reinstate his guidance on future, more spiritual work.
Mumt’r and Blincc had both been here before but not at the same time, not together. They drew strength from each other’s company and tried not to show the world around them and each other their fear. For both had been abused and maltreated in this hateful place. Mumt’r had escaped slavery by the skin of his teeth and had been severely beaten in the process. But worse, he had been imprisoned underground for many days. The lightless pit was an extended cellar of one of the grain houses of the place called Scyles. The place where it was rumoured their prey was living. He who was a demon hiding in a white man’s robe. The cellar was a holding house, used by the nomadic herders of men who passed with great frequency through his quarter of the city. After his escape, Mumt’r never slept in a building again. Not even the simplest huts by the all-cleansing sea. He would never wake in containment again.
Blincc’s story was less traumatic but equally unpleasant. Fate had made him the only witness to the Frenchman and Seil Kor returning from their disastrous journey into the Vorrh. Deep in its interior the Limboia had mistaken Seil Kor for another and unleashed the Orm on him: a hollowing of the soul that no other creature had ever survived. Blincc had seen this dead man move, slithering back into the forest and his true identity. He had been very young when he had been taken to Essenwald by his elder brothers, who after only a few days had caught some infectious illness, making them useless for the work that they so craved. Blincc had to take up the task to find money to feed them. This he had achieved, sweeping and carrying things around the office of the lumber station. He had taken the job without a word of the language that all seemed to speak. His brothers were sleeping at the edge of the bush where the iron tracks ran. He bought and stole simple rations to keep them alive, but had no money to pay for a healer or charming to banish the demons that gnawed at their groaning guts. He was doing his best and felt some pride in his warrior-like control of the situation. He kept his head down and his eyes averted, only occasionally receiving a blow from the overseers who ran the station. All was fine until the train arrived. It had been five days before he heard it calling out from the edge of the Vorrh. The other workers laughed at him when he looked so scared. They pointed to the track and made signs of horns on their heads. One jumped and hissed loudly. Blincc tried to ignore them. But when he thought he could not be seen he touched the black metal line. It was alive. He snatched back his fingers from its trembling surface and looked around. When the screeching, hissing monster entered the station he froze, the short hair on his young head standing bolt upright, hot urine running down his dirty leg, making a clean path on its journey. One of the hysterical men lobbed a tin can at him to break the restraint of his terror. Suddenly there were dozens of people everywhere, led by the white bellowing Men Without Substance. The vast black wagon stopped like a monstrous shadow held inside clouds of smoke and steam that rolled and hissed from its massive hot interior. Nobody else paid it any attention; they were too busy with the endless line of flatbeds that were strung out behind it, each laden with massive trunks and limbs of trees. He walked along the noisy line of wood and metal that clanked and shuddered as men attacked the sea-serpent-like chains that kept it all bound together. Ten flatbeds down, the slave carriages had been opened and the blinking occupants were spilling into the chaos of the platform. He approached them for a better look, his forgotten broom dangling from his hand, his body walking in mesmerised strides. When he got close, he stopped. His misunderstanding hitting a new level of impossibility. The men, if they were men, who stood before him had no souls. They had lost the light that should live in their eyes and were attached to nothing. Again, fear and curiosity became his engine and he stretched a hand out to touch one. He had seen many of the living and the dead and knew that these were different things. All his senses said so. He could not yet smell them. The smoke, greasy iron, and bleeding trees had overpowered the air in all directions. So he stretched forward to touch one.
“Outta da fucking way,” barked a voice in his ear, just before his head stung from the blow of the brass end of the whip that the overseer held in his hard pink fist. “Move yourselves,” he shouted down the line of soulless ones.
All obeyed, which was not surprising because this one was another kind of beast. The whitest white man he had ever seen, it was ferocious and red-haired and called Maclish. All wisely leapt to the side of its pointing whip and shouting commands. Blincc scrambled upright, holding the demanding confusion of his minor head wound and shambling out of the way of the massive activity that was taking place around him. Cranes had been winched over the flatbeds and machines were starting up to unload the trees. He looked back to see that his slender cheap broom had been snapped under the boots and solid naked feet of the workers. He walked away from the clusters of action, farther down the train to the untenanted flatbeds that lay outside the station’s attentions. The train was so long that he was almost out of earshot of all the voices that shouted around the action of the cranes. He was openmouthed and admiring the gigantic trunks and sensuously twisting ivy, each seeming more impressive than the last, as he slowly moved from one carriage to the next. He thought he could now see the end of the train and strained his eyes into the morning mist, which still held some of the cindery smoke. Then something moved. Something that he thought had been a tree. It moved again and turned itself into a small man sitting upright and holding on to a gnarled and stained branch. Blincc had no fear of this apparition because it looked more startled than he. It crawled on all fours to the edge of the flatbed and then tumbled down the side. It was another species of white man. Much smaller and dressed in the shredded clothes of the local people, which were discoloured and ragged. It could barely stand but seemed determined to make its way back towards the station. It stopped once along the track and stared at him with huge eyes that showed how lost and confused it really was. It looked at him and then turned and staggered back towards the engine, falling once or twice in the process. Blincc almost smiled. He had seen a white man who had less than he, and such a thing was unheard of.
The dazed young man put his hand on the flatbed to steady himself against such a tide of strangeness. He looked at the trees and chopped branches where the white man had nested to reassure his understanding of the meaning of the world. His eyes grazed over the twisted forms, unfocussed for a while, and then snatched back at the wood that was suddenly a man. A dead man contorted and chained down like the trees. His long filthy robe and his black skin were saturated with thick congealed sap. Blincc did not jump away from such a startling find. In many ways this dead man was much less scary and abnormal than all else he had seen since the monster smoked into the station. He brushed leaves and vines away from the face and found the startling, completely black eyes. Still he did not recoil. There was something about this lost brother that held him in fascination and not fear. He started to undo the chains; it seemed the most natural thing to do. For surely the body needed to be taken back to its people and aligned towards its ancestors. The sap was everywhere and made the process of unbinding him difficult. The mottled blue of the dead man’s robe was now showing under the grime and muck that Blincc’s hands and the chains were pulling off. His fingers were slipping on the chain and his strength made him slide about on the flatbed as he applied leverage and force. Eventually the chain was off and he bent the corpse over the edge of the carriage, its head hanging downwards and almost touching the track. He had it only by its feet when he felt it slither out of his hands and fall loosely down and under the wheels. The sliding weight had also unbalanced him and he slid towards the edge of the flatbed, which suddenly jolted. The train was moving, shunting farther down the track to unload more of its huge precious cargo. Blincc quickly grabbed hold of a restraining bar as everything shuddered and jolted forward. He pulled himself firmly towards the edge, looking down to see how badly the wheels had maimed the body. It was nowhere to be seen. It must be under the carriage, being mangled by the juddering movement. He began to fear for his job and the beating that might be coming his way. He should have left the thing alone, let somebody else be responsible for this accident, maybe even the dishevelled white man. He gauged the movements and stops and jumped onto the gravel and crouched down low to look under the train. Nothing was there. He walked back down the track still bent over, looking beneath the shifting carriages, expecting to find the tattered body any second. But it was not there. He scratched his head and looked up and down the line. Smoke and steam at one end and the shadow of the Vorrh at the other. He was just about to walk back to the station when he saw a glimmer in the scuffed ground. He bent down again and lifted a small silver crucifix out of the oil-stained earth. This must have been where the corpse landed. He stood up and examined the find, turning it against the sun; that’s when he saw it, out of the corner of his eye. Far down the line near the distant end of the flatbeds. Something was moving. Snakelike between the train and the living trees. He knew there were giant pythons in the forest. Had heard the tales of them eating men alive. He had even seen their movement near the water. He tried to reassure himself that that was exactly what he had seen. Nothing more than a large snake moving from under the train into the trees. But he knew it wasn’t, for in those few seconds he had recognized the patches of blue in the slithering motion just before it vanished into the trees. Then a question jolted him. Was this the shapeshifter that was foretold? The Black Man of Many Faces? Had the Men Without Substance been stealing him from the forest? Chained down?
He stood rooted to the spot, staring towards the infinity of the Vorrh.
“Hey, you!” bellowed the white man with fire hair as he marched towards him, an armed overseer at his side.
“Hey you, what you got there? Stay right where you are.”
Blincc watched horrified as they approached. The whip was still thrashing in the loud man’s hand. Then he did the only thing possible—he ran.
His eldest brother was standing in the clearing at the edge of town, looking down at the prone body of his middle brother who had died of the horrible sickness of the city. They buried him in the bush and limped out of their failed adventure in the white man’s land and began their long and weary journey home towards the healing sea, Charlotte’s little crucifix nesting, hidden, in Blincc’s deepest pocket. The cross that the Frenchman had taken to give as a present to his native guide, Seil Kor.
But that was all in the past when he was a youth; now he was grown and hard and stood equal beside the sturdy bulk of Mumt’r. They were in the Scyles and asking questions about Father Lutchen. It took less than thirty minutes to find the courtyard and the door to where he was said to live. They had their weapons ready and the sack folded across Blincc’s wide back. They had been stopped dead in their tracks by the weird plaintive music that came from an upper room. It was like the songs of mermaids that the older Sea People told of. Voices coming clear and beautiful out of the night sea, when the ripples of the full moon lulled the sleeping waves. Some of the elders believed this was where the first Oneofthewilliams had vanished, being lured beneath into the depths by the enchanting song. How could this holy man capture the song here, so far from the sea—did he have a mermaid imprisoned in his upper room? The warriors looked at each other and feared they were taking on a sorcerer whose magic was unexpectedly powerful. He was supposed to be only a Christian shaman, who also practised in darker realms, not a master of oceans and lures. They whispered for a moment and took on a brave resolve; they unsheathed their short spears and charged up the narrow staircase, kicking in the flimsy door with great force. The two ex-monks and the old priest sat close together, empty glasses in their astonished hands. Whatever spirit they had summoned was nimble and quick because it had escaped the transparent pots, which now hung silently in the hands of their immobilised captives, or spun sideways in a trough of water. Behind them stood a wooden man half covered in copper strips, a long gold trumpet in its hands. Blincc threw his spear at it while Mumt’r shouted at the monks. The figure fell backwards and the men shrank. They had been working all week on the mechanical trumpet player—a small commission but complex in its clockwork timing. It was to live on the silver bridge and spare the terror of the live musician who had the job of sounding the moon every month.
The younger two were bound and the older one led out of the house on the shark-toothed leash Tyc have given them. Should he intend to escape or run away, the lead would be yanked and the three-layered rows of the razor-sharp teeth would tear into the flesh of Lutchen’s thin neck, which was already bleeding from the first lightweight demonstration. They walked out of the Scyles without anybody seeing them. They took the least-known path and soon came to the high reeds where their boat was hidden. The old man was tied sitting up between them, his hands firmly bound to his scrawny ankles and the middle seat of the canoe. His mouth was stuffed with a dried pinecone and tied in place so that he could breathe but not utter spells during his journey. They waded the canoe and their prize into waist-deep water, then climbed aboard and paddled into the fast stream that hurried towards the coast.
Two days later Mumt’r and Blincc paddled into the streams of the Sea People with Father Lutchen bound between them.
“This is he?” gasped Tyc as she looked at the dishevelled old man sitting on the wet sand, the lead back on his scrawny neck. “He is worse than the last one.” She was speaking to Yuuptarno, who said nothing. “Ask him if he is the priest who told the other one not to bring the sacred child here, but to take her to him instead.”
It took Yuuptarno a good while to think how to say this in the pale words of Men Without Substance. When he did, Lutchen suddenly paid attention and denied any knowledge of the accusation. This was explained to Tyc.
“Is he lying?” she asked of the translator.
“Yes,” he said.
“Then beat him,” she said.
Yuuptarno walked out of the surf into the village and selected a stick of the appropriate weight and brought it back to the beach.
Lutchen thought it was a staff to help him stand or walk and was about to smile when the young man swung the stick and brought it down hard across his back and the side of his neck. The stick broke and Yuuptarno walked back to find a stouter one.
After much moaning, Lutchen pulled himself out of the hollow impression he had made in the sand and started begging for mercy.
“Ask him again,” Tyc said to the returning Yuuptarno, who was bearing a stick twice as thick as the last one. He stopped and tried to remember the sequence of strange-sounding words. After he said them, Lutchen started to flail his hand in air, babbling innocence and mercy.
“Does he answer?” she asked, and Yuuptarno shook his head and she then nodded hers.
This time the stick was swung into the base of his spine, just above his kidneys, and the old priest fell forward into his now-shallow impression in the sand that had been erased almost lovingly by the warm gentle sea.
Lutchen finally understood the question that was hiding under the blows that were knocking him in and out of consciousness. Yes, he said those things, and no, he did not know where the child was. He was then dragged through the village to the door of Oneofthewilliams’s hut, where he was forced to sing out all his crimes again, explain all his weaknesses and all his lies without ever daring to raise his eyes. His new role in life was explained to him by a voice in the hut. He was to go and find the child and protect her journey in the Vorrh. There were to be no mistakes. He thanked his new master and was taken away, catching sight of the sacred Williams only as he passed the door. His old God or one of his new ones must have been with him then, because he managed to vomit outside the holy place without being beaten again.
The Wassidrus discovered that he could not think forward, there was nothing in his part of the brain that speculated. Nothing that imagined. Everything that happened to him now came as a surprise or a shock. All he had were memories and they were constant and stung like a paper cut. So when without warning Kippa entered the hut and lifted him up like a tattered banner and walked him out to the centre of the village, he only had the past to keep him sane. The pole that he was part of, which extended to just short of his hopping leg, was notched into a slit in the ground. The juddering jar of it chewed at all of his sutures and stitchings as he stood upright for the first time, his bent leg twisting and flapping around the pole like a furled pennant trying to find its use and meaning. He heaved and stretched to find the boundaries of his weakness and felt their thinness, but he did not come apart.
A fluttering drum announced the arrival of the sacred one on his catafalque-like platform, carried by six men in simple yellow robes. He was tied to a seat with the same yellow cloth. It held him tight and allowed his arms to move about with great expressive freedom, as if giving the crowd around him precious and bounteous gifts. The saggy sock-bundled swelling that contained the brain was decorated with a tiara of seashells that glistened in the morning light. Apart from that, the rest of the truncated thing was naked. The Wassidrus saw that it had no genitals, and looked optimistically down at its own body, being able to see there for the first time. He too had nothing. Both parts of what had once been a man were sexless. He wanted to ponder why, but that gully of questioning lived in the other half under the yellow rag and the coronet of shells. So he remembered the brutal black witch who had butchered him and squeezed his brain hard to wring a plan of vengeance out of its narrow walls, wanting to imagine getting his hands on her fat puffy throat. But he had no hands and the straining only made things worse. It pushed his gatherings backwards as if on a slippery slope. There was no purchase in the present and he retreated uncontrollably into memories of his lost resolute power, where all that came under it whimpered as they were crushed. He tried to gain a foothold in the vindictive crags and flinty edges of those recollections, to stop sliding away from now and future conflicts. But the momentum of the gravity and the sliminess of the sides held no hope of grip, let alone traverse. He slithered only into recollections of what he had been, and this was the genius of the benign paradox in the cruelty of his punishment.
There was a new face in the grotesque procession. Another white man stood towards the back and stared at him in disbelief. The sacred one lifted his damaged hands to beckon the white man closer. The Wassidrus saw the hand and remembered the great pistol exploding in it; it was the last time he’d had a fully working body. He had been ambushed and defeated. His remaining fingers were now pointing at him and attached to the mangled remnant that seemed to be worshipped here. The fingers then prodded the old priest hard in his kidneys and he stumbled forward. Father Lutchen had seen many wonders, many horrors on his pilgrimage towards understanding the mechanisms that spoke of the diversity of God’s ideas. He had seen travesty and torture, ingenuity and splendour, and he had tried to master some of their techniques of existence, but nothing had prepared him for what he was looking at now. A thing that should be dead. A contradiction to the rules of life itself. The tatter of flesh with its live eyes that should have been taken by blood poisoning, shock, and infection or from the sheer lack of bodily organs. The quarter of a man that was sewn to a pole watched him in equal disgust, contemptuous of his life and repulsion. The smaller bundle of a man again dug at his ribs and Lutchen started speaking. The Wassidrus understood some of its meaning. The mangled German and French rattled somewhere in his memory.
“I am here to talk to, to speak your language. I am also to be your keeper.”
The word keeper had different words attached to it, the speaker trying them on before he finally settled. The cold grey eyes of the white man slid sideways to the gesturing bundle and its yellow-clad entourage. The fingers pointed.
“Also, also we are to travel together. I am to deliver you to the Vorrh, destiny waits there.”