Travellers #2 Read online

  A thousand suns jigged sapphire ripples as we crawled out the far side of the crescent lake. Indented in the sand between my hands – another footprint. As Taur got his breath, I brushed it out.

  The beach was fringed by red-flowering trees, trunks and branches twisted, tormented. Behind them, impenetrable, a hedge of iron thorns. And through those terrible defences came birdsong and the splash of water falling – like the music of the pipes the Travellers played. We staggered under the trees’ eccentric ceiling.

  “There’s a bit of dried meat in my pack,” I said to Jak and Jess, but they were already trampling and circling, dropping asleep in the shade.

  It seemed strange, trees growing so close to the desert. I tried to say that to Taur, but he was asleep, too. Between twisted roots, I scraped a hole and buried the green stone dolphin. “Now I can sleep,” I mumbled to Tara in my mind, and she withdrew. Drowsy ripples lapped the beach.

  I found myself standing in a desert, painting red-flowered trees upon a wall of air, painted Taur, Jak, Jess, and myself upon that transparent wall. Taur’s voice came, “Gaw, Urgsh! Gaw!” as I stepped into and through my own image, out of the desert heat into cool shade.

  Even in sleep I knew I had seen these trees before, remembered one on Marn Island, the tree Taur called an apple. Its fruit had been green-skinned; these were the same shape, as big as Taur’s fist, and red. One hung so close I saw my face in its polished skin. Something moved beside my reflection on that gaudy surface, and I heard my name. “Ish!” For a dizzy moment my face reflected in the mirrored eyes of a girl who leaned down and kissed me.

  I knew I need only say Tara’s name aloud, and she would be alive again. But the girl who stooped above me had black eyes, black hair, snow-white skin, and blood-red lips. Her gown swept the ground. Beneath its hem, slim feet barely dented the sand. Her embroidered bodice, its tiny gold buttons brushed my face as she reached past and plucked the rounded apple. My eyes followed the curve of her breast as she laughed, held out the apple.

  I bit through red skin into white flesh. Juice spurted in my mouth. “‘Surely, slumber is more sweet than toil,’” the girl sang. I lifted heavy eyes towards her. “Sodomah,” she smiled. “My name is Sodomah. Come!” She took my hand.

  “Gaw, Urgsh!” a voice called in the distance. I heard a scurry of feet and “Gaw!” as the hedge clashed shut its iron thorns behind us.

  Sodomah led me through banked flowers, under trees, beneath a strange, gentle sun. We came to a wall, unlike those of the long-vanished People of the Walls, upright, painted white, and shaded by a vine. Sodomah led inside where leaf-dappled light fell through windows on to the floor.

  “What would you eat, Ish?” How did she know my name? I no longer remembered Tara, saw only black hair and eyes, blood-red lips, and skin white as snow.

  Sodomah poured something she called wine in cups so fine my hands shook. Red drops flew on to her white gown, and a picture came to me of Taur hewing a bloody circle through the Salt Men on the floating island of ice. One mouthful of the heavy wine – musky like blood – and the picture faded.

  I was looking down on a man lying on cushions beside a table. A man with arms and legs burned dark by the sun, scratched and scarred. He looked up at me, stared. His eyes, a bright blue, flashed in his brown face. He leapt, whipping out a knife. Knocked aside cushions, overturned a stool as he landed on his feet and jumped to one side. Suspicion peered out of his blue eyes. He glanced about even more quickly, less sure of himself, uncertain what to do next.

  “Nobody is going to harm you.” Sodomah led me across to touch the wall which reflected both of us and everything else in the room. Once, Tara had shown me a piece of polished metal which showed my face when I looked into it. But this mirror was a huge wall and ceiling of something Sodomah called glass.

  I had to run my hands over its cool, smooth surface. Where I leaned close my breath covered it like a layer of fog so the reflection dulled, uncertain. My fingers left marks on the glass.

  Sodomah laughed as I explored the strange wall. Could I step through and into that other room, find those others, ourselves repeated there again, mimicking everything we did in the real room? And which was real, the room in which we stood, or that one from which I stared back at myself?

  Sodomah laughed again. I watched her in the thing she called a mirror, and turned to see her beside me in this room. Dizzy, I knocked the glass with my knuckles.

  “You will crack it,” Sodomah warned as I went to rap it with the back of my knife. “Broken glass cuts sharper than any blade. Come. Eat. Taur and the dogs are being looked after.”

  She pointed, and I looked through an opening in the wall. In the distance Taur, Jak, and Jess sat eating under a red-flowered tree. Taur drank and wiped his mouth. I knew the gesture.

  I threw myself down, stared wordless at my reflection on wall and ceiling as I sank deeper in the cushions’ softness. My stained tunic, scratched bruised legs and arms looked out of place, sprawled on the delicate woven coverings. I ate and drank, and my double copied me in that other room.

  Sodomah poured more wine. Fumes pulsed in my head. I woke between sheets of neither wool nor hair, but some other yarn, fine and white. A mild sun fell pleasant across my bed. It is one of the things I remember of the garden, that the sun was gentle there. I raised on one elbow. Down a long vista through flowers and green branches, I saw Taur asleep with the dogs beneath the tree.

  My gear hung on the wall. My pack and heavy cloak hanging. Instead of my old tunic I was wearing one made of fine stuff. Most astonishing, I had been washed. All over. And my skin was soft with oil. It must have taken several people to carry, bathe, dress me in this tunic, and lay me on the couch.

  I felt for the green stone dolphin round my neck. It had gone! I opened my mouth to shout to Taur, but remembered burying it under the tree.

  Another huge mirror made up one entire wall and the ceiling of my room. Again, I was dizzied by images of myself, the room and all its furnishings. Echo upon echo, reflection upon reflection. My skin looked paler. The dust and dirt of the desert washed off. Whoever scrubbed me must have been amazed by my whiteness beneath.

  Three dwarfs appeared side by side in the door. Arms and legs solid with muscle. Bodies thick as the walls. One of them clapped his hands to where his ears had been lopped. The second dwarf pointed to his eye sockets, painful empty holes. The third pointed to his mouth, stitched up until it was only a healed scar. The blind dwarf produced a grotesque moo, a questioning note.

  “You want me to follow?”

  They bowed, led me into a corridor lined with more mirrors. I was still uneasy at the reflection of myself walking nearer or, when I turned around, diminishing behind. A thousand confusing images.

  The dwarfs led into a large room where Sodomah, her back to me, played the strings of a long-necked instrument, her true voice unwinding a song. I looked at the fall of her long black hair, the lovely movement of her arm. She turned, smiled, led me to a bench covered with soft cushions. The dwarfs vanished.

  Sodomah smiled. “You have escaped great evil, Ish. This is Dene, the end of all your travelling. Your journey has been long. Here are no more hardships, no unhappiness. Learn now to enjoy life.”

  Again I wondered how she knew my name, but forgot to ask. Life was sweet in Dene, an endless garden in which it seemed perpetual noon. The dwarfs foresaw my every need, but one. Whenever I questioned them, one pointed to his eyes, one to his ears, the other his mouth.

  I ate each day with Sodomah, listened to her sing and play, walked hand in hand with her through the garden, plucking and eating the red apples. The days drifted past like clouds or their shadows, and I forgot my questions. I even forgot Taur, Jak, and Jess.

  Sodomah was curious about our journey. Had we any other companions? How did we cross the desert? From where did we come? I answered as best I could while keeping Squint-face and the Salt Men a secret. All that seemed a bad dream, a world of deceptive reflections: the fl
oating island of ice, the pursuit, the cannibal feast. Only Dene and Sodomah were real.

  I explained that Taur and I were the last of our people, had travelled south after they perished by massacre. In Dene where the present was reflected again and again in the cold walls of mirrors, I did not think I was lying by not telling Sodomah the whole truth of our past. There were times I wondered if the mirrors might begin to reflect that past, mingle those images with the present. My mind became confused at the thought. I still could not understand how the garden existed beside the desert and, although I sometimes wondered what lay further south, a reluctance prevented me repeating to Sodomah the questions the three dwarfs would not answer.

  Each night there was soft rain to keep the flowers blooming, the trees green, the fruit ever fresh. Each day the sun shone, a sun that never burned, never raged an orange tower up the sky. Life in Dene was a succession of contentments. My limp vanished. Indolence seemed the way life should be. And most of all there was Sodomah.

  I remember seeing the curve of her breast as she reached for the apple above me, that first time I saw her, feeling her embroidered bodice brush my face, the cool lipping of its golden buttons. And, as we walked together, I was excited again by the movement of her hips, glimpse of ankle, narrow foot. Her white arms, bare to the shoulder: I wanted to touch her skin, find if it was as soft and cool as it looked.

  One morning I returned to my room to find a sheet of the glass, a mirror, set upon a three-legged frame. Brushes on a shelf, and thick, oily paints of many colours, rich and thick, and looking good enough to eat. I loaded a brush with red paint and, bending forward to lay a stroke across the glass, saw my reflection there and stopped. I had been about to paint a girl’s face, someone forgotten.

  Through the window and far in the distance at the end of a green avenue, Taur stood under the red-flowered tree, Jak and Jess behind him. I thought I heard a distant, “Urgsh!” and Taur raised his arms, beckoning. I glanced at the wall of mirrors around the room, saw a pair of black eyes repeated many times as they grew smaller, distant, and disappeared, and I dropped the brush.

  That night, bathed and clean in a fresh tunic, I ate and drank with Sodomah. “Gaw!” I thought I heard a voice in the distance. “Urgsh!”

  Sodomah laughed, filled my glass with the red wine. I knew I desired her. I had never known a woman’s body, though I remembered dreaming of another young woman whose name vanished as I thought of it. I remembered wondering about Hagar’s old woman’s body as I grew up, when we were the Travellers. But here was a beautiful young woman laughing, brushing against me, leaning forward so her breasts swung against her gown. She held my eyes with hers, moved her legs, and from under the cloth came a silken shirr! shirr!

  Sodomah offered fruit she called grapes. Held the bunch towards me, danced away, and offered it again. I snatched. She laughed and held it behind her. Perhaps it was something to do with the red wine, the silken rustle, but my mind confused the thought of the grapes and her hidden breasts. I was unsure which of the dancing girls I saw was real, which mere images. Sodomah leaned forward in her dance so I looked and gasped and grasped once more, and once more she laughed, a grape between her red-painted lips.

  Clumsy, I tried to seize it. She laughed, shook her head. I leaned forward, and she swayed to meet me. As I took the grape from her lips with mine, Sodomah bit so juice spurted like blood on my tongue. I cupped one breast with my hand, her lips pressed mine, and I fell face down in the cushions. Stiff with lust I struggled up, but only her laugh floated on the perfumed air.

  Head thick with red wine, body hard for hers, I set out to find my room, angry with desire. The three dwarfs appeared with lamps which threw our shadows up the wall and across the roof, distorted in yet more mirrors. They bowed and led me along corridors. In my room, I threw myself down, pressed against the cushions as if they were Sodomah.

  I dreamed our bodies were entangled, making love. At last I woke, wondered if I was dreaming still or in some reflected room of unreality, smelled her perfume, heard the echo of a laugh, and slept again.

  Chapter 19

  Escaping the Garden

  We wandered each day by clear rivulets that purled and murmured. Sometimes I saw Taur and the dogs crossing the ends of long avenues, searching, and Sodomah would laugh. Once I saw them bathing in the sapphire crescent lake and was surprised to see how strongly Taur now swam. Just seeing them far off was reassurance enough.

  There seemed no end to this ease. And beckoning, inviting all the time, the brushes lay before the mirror on its easel. I planned a vast record, to paint our journey on the walls and ceilings of glass, covering them with our adventures, till all through Sodomah’s house not a reflection returned from the mirrors. But something held me back from picking up a brush. In that soft air nothing was urgent.

  I half-woke in my room one night after another evening’s feasting and drinking. Moonlight slanted a white shaft to the floor. I lay listening to the splashing of a fountain and wondered if I was asleep again as – ghostlike through dimness of night or dream – Sodomah stalked naked towards my bed, not one but a bewildering succession of dim white images, reflecting back and forth in the darkened mirrors.

  Sodomah sighed as, wordless, she slipped between the sheets and drew my hands upon herself. In the silent dark, half asleep, unsure whether it was silk or flesh, the softness she led my fingers to explore, I learned her body, so different to my own. When my excitement was intolerable, she brought me into herself and winced, a drawn whisper echoed by my gasp. Time stopped. There was only our intricate moving clasp of arms, legs. As if we were one body, only a single heart beat between us. The height of our lovemaking came like a blow that made me half-lift myself and cry out, “Sodomah!” yet thinking of someone else, dimly remembered. All that charmed night we lay together, until Sodomah disappeared before the light.

  Next day I could not find her. Not in the house. Not in the garden. Taur and the dogs I could see resting under the red-flowered tree. I ran down another corridor of flowers calling, “Sodomah!” but only heard Taur’s voice in reply calling, “Urgsh!” That night, though, when I had gone to bed, when all outside was moonlight again, Sodomah was there, leading, teaching me, compliant to my every wish – by dark.

  Only the world of Dene existed. Nothing mattered but the gold days of music, food, and wine, Sodomah singing, dancing; the silver nights of mirrors reflecting half-formed shadows, advancing, retreating.

  The only thing Sodomah denied me was the sight of her ecstasy. She came only in darkness. When I wanted to bring a lamp to our lovemaking, she found some excuse; when I tried to insist, she forbade it. I had to be content with moonlight falling across the floor, our dark bed all the darker.

  One night I woke, upon the air the echo of an old voice croaking a question. In the shadowed uncertainty of waking I heard its last words, “… green stone dolphin?”

  “Green stone dolphin?” my own voice repeated, and Sodomah stirred, drew me down. “You were dreaming,” she murmured, and I sank again.

  Another night I heard somebody urging me to paint our story. I listened, wondered if it was Old Hagar’s voice. Then it changed, became a young woman’s, one I remembered somewhere. And still I did not take up the brush.

  Many times I begged Sodomah to make love during the day. Many times asked if I might light a candle in my room. Always she forbade it until I became lit by curiosity.

  I had in my pack Taur’s flint and steel. Secret, I hid them on a shelf beside the bed. One night, while Sodomah slept after our lovemaking, I struck sparks from the flint, got the charred cloth glowing, blew it to a flame. Lit a lamp I had concealed, held it high. Like shirring water, light rippled across the silken sheets. Reflections sprang up the walls and ceiling, repeated over and over, shadows, images mocking back and forth.

  Against the pillow it looked like a little old man’s head, the bald scalp wrinkled, dry. Then I saw her black hair, a wig awry, half-hidden. Mouth sucked in, lips pleate
d with lines, skin webbed about each eye. White powder crumbled from raddled cheeks. Red paint smeared grotesque. In the mirrored walls, the horrid image repeated itself to disappearance. My hand shook so a drop of hot oil from the trembling lamp spurted on one withered breast.

  “Galug!” And something else in an unknown tongue. “Galug!” A crash of falling glass. Face contorted, mouth clenched, the ancient voice screamed. Humped like a beetle, something scuttled and hunched from a thousand tumbled beds, screamed down a thousand corridors, each image shrieking demonic from the toothless rictus. “Galug!” Its rage detonates still.

  Suddenly I saw the bed as a grave, could not breathe for the taste of clay. The place was abhorrent, the heavy fragrance of flowers repulsive. The rich food cloyed; the musky wine; the endless indolent days. Hagar’s story of the young man and the old crone flashed before my eyes. As if I were hearing – seeing – the story for the first time, I saw the beautiful young girl’s mask split open and reveal her mother’s ancient face glutted with sex.

  “Galug!” The dry old voice of rage dwindled. At its caw, the mirrors cracked across, splintered into blades, each reflecting a lamp: a torrent of falling lights. Glistening, pouring shards and fragments, an impassable heap of daggered spikes.

  “Galug! Galug!”

  Blood streamed a curtain down my side where a fragment of glass slipping from the roof had touched light as a feather. Passing the mirror still upon its easel, I dipped one finger in my own gore and sketched a hawk flying, a curve for its wing, the wild eye.

  “Galug! Galug!” The voice returning. And from far away another voice, “Urgsh! Urgsh!”

  Tunic and gear into my pack. Out the window with my weapons, and I followed them. Slack from the easy days, I fell back, clambered out. Across the gardens, still naked, pack and knife belt over one shoulder, spear, bow and arrows in the other arm, I ran calling, “Taur!” Running, running.