Extract from Patrick Chance’s Diary
Tashkara, June 1888
This is an eerie place, quite aside from its being a colony of lepers.
The leper who met us (have not yet established his nationality but his name is Fenris and his English is excellent), says the palace has been used many times by nomad tribes: they live here for a few years, or a few generations, and then move on. It’s fallen into strange hands during its long history, he says; evil hands. This I can believe, because I’ve never encountered a place so filled with brooding menace.
‘But it is not the evil from the past that overshadows us, Patrick,’ says Fenris. ‘It is the evil that stalks us from the future, that waits for us in the shadows of our unfolded life, that we have most to fear.’
On reflection, do not think I have ever heard quite such a macabre pronouncement.
Later. Fierce argument with Theo who thinks we should stay safely shut away in our stone hut and set off at first light without seeing or speaking to any of the lepers.
‘Because it’s a sinister, hungry thing, leprosy,’ he says, as if he visualises some kind of ravaged-faced Middle Ages Death symbol prowling the night in search of prey, rattling its crumbling bones and huffing its diseased breath through the cracks in the windows. ‘A few hours here is as much as we dare risk, Patrick.’
But I’m curious about these people, and – although I haven’t admitted this to Theo – I would like to feel more comfortable about them. To ignore them tonight and walk away in the morning would only make me feel even worse.
(Wonder if this is the feeling that really charitable people experience. Like giving your last coin to a starving beggar, because it’s less agonising to feel hungry yourself than to imagine someone else doing so.)
Anyway, when I saw a small fire being lit in the courtyard and a huge black cooking pot slung gypsy-fashion over it, I stumped off, leaving Theo to please himself what he did, and approached the group of people. (Did not do so without a qualm of apprehension, but this is an admission I make only in these pages.)
They appeared to be preparing their evening meal. Several of them were building the fire, and two were stirring the contents of the cooking pot. It smelled savoury and good.
They looked around as I approached and fell silent, and it was left to Fenris to say in his mocking blurred voice, ‘You are either very brave or very unusual, Patrick. Most people would barricade themselves in the stone building and scuttle off at first light.’ (He’s either a mind-reader or was listening through the keyhole when I was arguing with Theo.)
I said, ‘I can’t see that an hour or so spent talking with you is any extra risk. And it might be that we could arrange for help to be sent out to you – medicines, clothing. Perhaps we could talk about that. Is this your supper time? Am I intruding?’
‘Yes, it is our supper hour and no, you are not intruding,’ said Fenris. ‘Unless in extreme pain, or suffering from physical sickness, we all gather to eat the evening repast together, usually in this courtyard, but occasionally in the stone hall in the east wing. The palace is big enough for us to live a little apart from one another, but we all meet each evening.’
‘We like to do so,’ put in another of them, a bit hesitantly. ‘It means we can bring to the supper table the details of our day, and hear how the day has been for others.’
‘A time for sharing,’ said a third. ‘Little pieces of news about our work, or perhaps an amusing or an interesting occurrence.’
‘You save it all up for the evening,’ said one of the women. ‘You know the others will be doing the same.’ She was ravaged and thin, but it was possible to see that she must have been very good-looking once. I glanced at her with interest, and she smiled. There was a fleeting impression of dark slumberous eyes and of an immense inner tranquillity.
Two other women sat with her and I saw that although they were helping with spooning out the food, the men were joining in with the task. The dark-eyed woman studied me and I had the feeling that she had heard my thoughts. When she said, ‘You see that all are truly equal here,’ I knew I had been right.
‘You all help with the work?’
‘Yes, for as long as possible. Those who can no longer walk are carried here. Those who no longer have the use of their hands are fed. We do not shut ourselves away to suffer and die alone.’
I remained silent, and Fenris said, ‘Sridevi is right, Patrick. It is important to preserve normality for as long as possible.’
It was pitiful. It was brave and admirable but it was so pitiful I wasn’t sure I could bear it. But they had to bear it. I said, ‘There is – forgive me – there is pain and sickness at times?’
‘Yes. As the disease progresses. But it is not,’ said Fenris firmly, ‘a discussion to have whilst eating. If you are determined to stay, Patrick, will you sit here? There will be a portion of stew ladled for you.’
It was an extraordinary experience to sit there with night stealing across the mountains, and to watch these poor spoiled, cursed human beings crawl out of their doorways and across the courtyard. Several had to be helped to the fire, some leaned heavily on sticks, and three or four could not walk at all. These last were brought on a kind of litter which the others carried. I had to repress the urge to jump up and help them all, because I guessed this would be wrong. They clung to independence for as long as they could. In the end, they had all congregated around the fire, some half lying, some propped up, and food was ladled into small wooden bowls and passed around. It was mostly rice – what’s called tsampa out here – but it was flavoured with apricots and nuts and some kind of local vegetable. There was a wedge of coarse-grained bread to go with it, and it was all surprisingly palatable. Theodore was probably skulking supperless in the stone room. Serve him right.
‘Are you self-sufficient here? What happens about food?’
‘Some of us are still able to work the land a little,’ said Fenris. ‘We can grow much of our food. And there is milk from our goats and sometimes we can make cheese.’ His voice was so full of patient acceptance that I wanted to cry or throw things about. In his place I would probably have hurled the cooking pot across the courtyard and smashed things to pieces out of sheer frustration. But probably he had gone beyond that point. ‘There is no cure for this curse, you know,’ he said.
Curse . . . So he saw it like that as well.
I said, ‘Is there nothing that could be done to make life easier for you?’
‘No. No cures, no medicines. We shall die early,’ said Sridevi. ‘We shall not suffer easy deaths, because this is not an easy disease.’
‘There is the corroding of bones, the eating away of flesh and muscle,’ said Fenris. ‘A gradual loss of sensation. Perhaps blindness or deafness—’ From the deep hood, his eyes caught the firelight.
‘But we have accepted it,’ said Sridevi. ‘And we are more comfortable than you would think.’ She made a quick gesture with one impossibly thin, but still beautiful hand, taking in the people seated in the circle of firelight. ‘We are amongst our own people: creatures who will not shrink from us in disgust. No one makes us walk the land with a bell about our necks to proclaim our filth so that people can scurry away. We tend our own, and that is more of a comfort than you can imagine.’
‘We exchange whatever skills we have brought from the outside world,’ said Fenris. ‘That is why some of us know a little English. And there are evenings when we celebrate birthdays or other events we remember from our earlier lives. Sometimes we have a story-telling evening, sometimes music.’ He studied me, the hooded head on one side. ‘Occasionally,’ he said, with a sudden glint of amusement, ‘there is even the pleasure of sharing a bed.’
‘Ah. Indeed?’
‘Not all the senses vanish, Patrick,’ said Fenris, and the wry humour was there again. I saw him exchange a sudden smile with Sridevi and I wanted to sit down and cry again.
One of the lepers who had not spoken until now, leaned forward and said in careful hesitant English, ‘Will you try a little of our wine? We keep it for special occasions.’ He held out a small stone jug.
‘And to have a guest with us for supper is a very special occasion indeed,’ said another.
There was such pride in their voices that I felt the twist of pity all over again, not in the heart this time, but in the gut. Pity is an emotion that ought to stay in the region of the heart; it oughtn’t to gouge unromantically into your bowels like a twisting white-hot knife.
The wine was absolutely terrible. I sipped it and then downed it in one go, hoping they would take this for eagerness rather than the wish not to let the taste linger on my palate any longer than necessary. When I had stopped being cross-eyed, one of them was saying something about the palace being a gateway to the real Tashkara.
‘The Forbidden City?’ I said.
‘Yes. We are permitted to live on the boundaries, because we form a natural barrier.’
‘We are therefore treated generously,’ said Fenris expressionlessly.
‘By who?’
The lepers glanced uneasily at one another, and then the one who had proffered the wine said, in a whisper, ‘By Touaris.’
I set down my dish. ‘Who,’ I said, ‘is Touaris?’
‘A what?’ said Theodore, sitting up crossly and glaring at me across the dim stone room. ‘You are proposing to search for the temple of what?’
‘I know it sounds far-fetched, but her name is Touaris and—’
‘How old did you say she is?’
‘Well, Fenris and the others said nearly three thousand years, but of course that can’t be right—’
‘You said a cat goddess,’ said Theo, bristling with hostility. ‘You said a three-thousand-year-old cat goddess who lets the lepers live here and occasionally sends them the scraps from her ceremonial feasts.’
‘Yes, the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table, or rather the woman’s—’
‘With a temple deep inside a forbidden city.’
‘Well, yes, there’s supposed to be a temple. Actually it all sounds very interesting. According to Fenris and Sridevi the cult started in ancient Egypt with the Bubasti tribes. A group of them were exiled sometime during the eleventh dynasty, when the princes of Thebes were beginning to spread their power under one of the pharaohs – I forget which one. Anyway, a small group travelled east until they reached a remote part of Tibet.’
‘Why were they exiled?’ demanded Theo suspiciously.
‘Religious persecution. The Egyptians worshipped the cat goddess Bastet, you see—’
‘Yes, I do know that, Patrick.’
‘And the original Touaris was the divinity of childbirth and horribly ugly, but the rebels held that that was a distortion, and that the real Touaris was dazzlingly beautiful.’
Theo muttered something that sounded like, ‘Trust you to come across the legend of a beautiful woman even out here.’
‘According to Fenris, some of the tribe had begun to practise a forbidden mixture of the two worships,’ I said, repressively. ‘The cat goddess and the fertility goddess. But it was frowned on by Pharaoh, and if Pharaoh frowned on you in those days, you were destined for a very nasty end indeed. So the Bubasti rebels brought Touaris – their Touaris – and the cult to Tibet.’
‘And Touaris is still living – how many years on did you say?’
‘Well, three thousand was mentioned, but obviously it isn’t the same Touaris, and if you’d only listen—’
‘I don’t want to listen,’ said Theo irritably, punching his thin pillow and hunching the blanket crossly about his shoulders. ‘I don’t want to know about any of it, because if anyone is going to commit the supreme folly of going into the ancient temple of some pseudo-immortal cat goddess it isn’t going to be me!’
It’s a pity about Theo. Wonder if I had told him that Touaris is believed to be guarded by four score female attendants of outstanding beauty he would have changed his mind? Apparently there’s a ceremonial mating ritual as well, which Fenris, suddenly and surprisingly prim, says is licentious, depraved, orgiastic, and, what’s worse, performed in public.
‘Not,’ he says firmly, ‘anything that English gentlemen would care to witness.’
To hell with witnessing it. If we can find it we’ll take part in it.
Later. The gut-wrenching pity I felt earlier turns out to be not so much due to what the Bible terms shutting up the ‘bowels of compassion’ as to bowels scoured by unripe wine. I only wish mine had shut up, because I’ve just crawled back from an exceedingly unpleasant half-hour in the rudimentary but mercifully serviceable wooden hut on the edge of the palace compound. To start with I feared the lepers simply dig holes like soldiers in battlefields, but they have a couple of earth closets discreetly situated, and I staggered into the nearest and prayed not to die. Squalid and sordid to die crouching over a wooden box with a hole in the top, retching your guts up at the same time.
On the second trip I discovered with horror what I had been too far in extremis to notice the first time: namely that the hut and its contraption are wedged precariously on a couple of planks suspended over part of the swirling river. Everything simply drops through! Remembered with fresh nausea all the times Theo and I had drunk from mountain streams (tributaries of this very river, of course), and then had to dash inside again for another bout of vomiting and purging.
‘Serve you right for drinking too-young wine,’ said Theo disapprovingly, but at least he put a basin by my bed, and brought me a glass of milk.
‘The sanitation here is appalling,’ I said plaintively.
‘There isn’t any sanitation. I don’t know about leprosy, we’ll both be lucky if we don’t end up with cholera.’
At this rate I’ll never get within leering distance of the four score females of outstanding beauty, never mind what somebody once called prick-ing distance. Perhaps it’s as well. After three trips in as many hours to that noisome wooden hut I couldn’t prick so much as a flea.
The pulsating drumbeats had ceased when Lewis and Kaspar reached the courtyard, and the Flesh-Eaters were clustering around the terrible Altar, eager greed in every curve of them. Their half-naked bodies gleamed in the flaring torchlight and their lips curled back, showing the pronounced canine teeth. The air was rich with the aroma of roasting meat and laden with voracious hungers, and Lewis had the extraordinary sensation that if he reached out he could plunge his hands wrist-deep into the atmosphere and scoop up handfuls of it.
Kaspar moved to the head of the Burning Altar. He’s their leader, thought Lewis: I ought to have seen it straightaway. I wonder if it was only by chance that he was the one who met me at the palace entrance?
The burned mound of flesh that had once been Cal was no longer moving, but it was still recognisable as a human being. The hair had gone and the fingers and toes had blurred and melted into twisted lumps. A scatter of small hard chippings lay beneath the hands and feet where toenails and fingernails had fallen out. The face was shrivelled and almost burned away; scorched bones protruded through the cheeks and the jaw had fallen apart, showing cracked teeth. Around the eye sockets was a thin crispness where the eyes had burst and leaked. But the body – the trunk and the upper legs and arms and shoulders – was a huge meaty carcase, juicy and succulent, ready for the carving.
As Lewis stood silently at the Altar’s foot, Kaspar’s people looked up, but no one moved and they were all plainly waiting for their leader’s signal. But anticipation shivered and thrummed on the air, thick and strong and powerful.
Lewis said in a voice devoid of all emotion, ‘So that is how a human looks after he has been roasted on the Burning Altar.’ He met Kaspar’s gaze coolly. ‘And now?’
‘Now,’ said Kaspar, ‘we eat him.’
At once the Flesh-Eaters surged forward, and the low groan of anticipation that Lewis had heard earlier on broke from them. The drumming began again, faster and filled with throbbing urgency. Kaspar regarded his people with a thin smile, almost as if he felt faint contempt for them, and then reached for the long glinting knife lying on the Altar’s edge.
As the knife-blade was driven through the breast of Cal, thick fat spurted, and the watchers moved at once, holding out their hands to catch it and instantly smearing it sensuously into their bodies, their heads thrown back, their eyes half closed. Several more pressed forward eagerly, and Kaspar cut again. The flesh parted and Kaspar began systematically to slice portions away from the trunk and thighs, handing the steaming cooked flesh to his people. They took it avidly, the fat running over their hands and dripping from their fingers. As they crammed it into their mouths, grease ran down over their lips and chins, and several who had not yet been served leaned forward, salivating like animals.
After the first few mouthfuls, the Flesh-Eaters began to dance at the courtyard’s centre, whirling in a frenzied leaping rhythm, holding up the remains of their food, their fingers running with grease, their lips and chins shiny. Three or four of the older ones sat cross-legged on the ground, holding thin rib bones horizontally to their lips, nibbling at the shreds of meat and then sucking on the bones.
‘The heart and entrails and stomach we bum,’ said Kaspar, glancing at Lewis. ‘But almost everything else is consumed. You are ready?’
‘Yes.’
The dancers were growing more frenzied with every minute, and the men were seizing the females, flinging them down on the ground and thrusting between their legs. Hands that were slicked with human grease and human fat slid between thighs and across breasts, leaving sticky trails. The burning torches flickered wildy, casting their reddish glow everywhere, and throwing the shadows of the dancers across the palace’s walls, grotesquely enlarged and distorted until they were scarcely human at all. The night sky was suffused with the crimson radiance, and Lewis, looking about him, thought: I was right about being in hell. These are the fire-drenched caverns that Dante wrote about and Milton.
Kaspar waited with a kind of impersonal courtesy until the jerking coupling was over and the men and women sat up, and then handed Lewis a portion of the cooked flesh. It was warm and unexpectedly smooth to the touch, and as the scent reached Lewis’s nostrils, his mouth flooded with hunger-juice. A great waiting silence had fallen on the courtyard, and then without warning, the drummer began to tap against the skin-drum, not with the pounding sexual rhythm he had used earlier, but lightly and insidiously. At once the Flesh-Eaters began their chant again, and although the words were still unfamiliar, the meaning was unmistakable.
‘Eat . . . Eat . . . EAT . . .’
Lewis wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and breaking off a piece of the flesh, put it in his mouth and swallowed it.
There was a low groan of triumph from the Flesh-Eaters. Lewis looked at them and then, meeting Kaspar’s stare across the Altar, held out his hand for more.