Celebrant Page 11

  The singing comes from all around him. There is quiet drumming accompanying it. The singing is not insistent, the lines alternate long and short, in men’s voices, solemn, lively, and calm. He doesn’t recognize the language.

  I’m invisible (deKlend thinks suddenly), and they are invisible to me. This town might be full of life and light that is hidden from me as I come into it from outside.

  He gazes around him and sees only houses, still air. There are a few trees. Crickets.

  This town is full of life and light (he thinks)

  He goes through a wide open door, into one of the houses. It smells like a linen closet. People are going to and fro in the darkened house in silence, lost in thought. They take short steps and their heads sway a little from side to side as they walk, avoiding bumping into each other but not avoiding contact. A figure steps through a wide doorway, the head a blot of shadow against the glowing wall, absorbed by the mass of darkness in the hall before him. White shirts dwindle away in the clear gloom, fish sinking into murky water. deKlend follows them through thin hallways whose walls are lined with doorways shoulder to shoulder, all open. He turns corners from one narrow doorway to another, in among the milling people, shadow skin and incandescent white shirt, ghostly jostling, to-and-fro in and otu I mean out of the doorways. The floorboards creak, heels tump the floor, clothing rustles.

  They are all preoccupied. Listening to the singing, lost in thought, found in the song. deKlend steps down quickly into an atrium where the singers stand near the garden wall, with their heads above the level of the wall and lost in the sky. They sway, turning their waists or stepping very lightly from side to side, and from time to time their motions bring their heads down slightly so that fractions of their silhouettes show against the wall’s moonslab. Some play small drums and others clap their foggy hands. The singing is no louder, no more immediately coming from any particular direction. Listening to it, deKlend feels more and more peaceful, but perhaps that would be different if he understood the words. They sing without being entranced songs they’ve obviously sung forever. Singing lively and solemn, echoes carry out the remains of each word like servants clearing away the leftovers.

  The invisible observer suddenly becomes visible—

  Abruptly revealed, deKlend flees the house, pursued only by himself. He runs as fast as he can, throwing panic-stricken looks over his shoulder at the tranquil street behind him.

  Rounding a corner he sidesteps into an alley between a low wall and the pot belly of a small house, against which he presses his back and the palms of his hands. Silence includes the faint song, crickets too, excludes only the harsh grating of his breath. An owl actually hoots. A moment later, his shadow jogs by in the street. It misses him.

  deKlend cranes his ears after the noiseless feet. In front of him, on the other side of a low fence of cement blocks, are plants that hold themselves relaxed and erect, drinking soberly in the dark. Climbing over, deKlend thinks he’ll hide among them—then halfway he is brought up short by a flash, watching from under the fronds as his shadow, standing in the street, peers at him over the fence. deKlend changes his mind and hurries down the alley instead, pausing at the other end. A voice speaks to him. A woman’s gently marvelling voice, speaking a quiet exclamation that disperses in space like an X of perfume. It is there, too close behind him. Immediately.

  Terror gathers to leap up from his body into his head but is suppressed the same moment, like a hand quashing a candle flame; he forgot, distracted by the woman’s voice, and he is borne along like a dream body on the tide.

  The land is level as a table, the white buildings of the town unlit and far away like bluish phantoms, and nearly as far off in the other direction a colossal animal, like a huge burning haystack with elephant legs, plods along the horizon trailing smoke high into the air.

  Consulting the manual:

  “Theem,” singular and plural, is the name given to these vast life forms. They originate on a planet of reeds—one half water, one half reeds. They rove back and forth across the plains without ever stopping or leaving any trace behind them, ponderously gathering nourishment. What appears to be smoke rising from the upper portion of the trunk is actually a great twirling fan of silk that trawls its food from the clouds and the upper air.

  Stand downwind of one, and ocean surf will be smelled. It’s unmistakeable.

  Theem are colony animals consisting of millions of tough, eel-like creatures like living metal strips twined together. They form in tidal swamps, far inland, when, miraculously, the eels, churning up from the mud in a nervous eruption, knot together in immense serpents, as big as fallen redwoods. These roll to and fro, crushing everything to the earth, until they find each other; then they knit together, forming a crotch at one end. Still more swarm together and, as the being hoists itself upright like a living derrick, the upper bulk takes shape, forming itself into a hollow hull or band shell. Finally, the sail of wire smoke is unfurled exuberantly into the sky. The metabolism of the whole is adjusted so that the lower eels consume the waste of the upper eels, and the bottommost eels eat nothing, or perhaps dirt.

  The Theem walks without crashing, without even shaking the earth, and leaves no footprints because it has no feet to speak of. Vines spread from the base of each leg as it is raised, dropping to the ground in coils well in advance of the shift of its many tons, and, when that shift comes, they distribute the pressure so evenly that the ground is indented no more by the weight than it is by the wind. Then, as the leg is lifted again, the springs uncoil and, withdrawing, sweep off their marks.

  Theem are eerily quiet for their size; even directly beneath the groin, horrid with dangling, staring eels, one can hear only a creaking noise, reminiscent of the sound of an overburdened rope bridge. Infrequently there is a sharp crack!, like a popping knee or neck joint, when a bolus of tension is squeezed. But the Theem’s silence is no sign of deafness; each of its millions of eels retains its powers of hearing and of sight, even those buried deep within the body. The Theem is at every moment wakeful, fully conscious, seeing and hearing every inch of its surroundings, and itself.

  Being composed entirely of independent living organisms, Theem are virtually immortal; when an eel dies, it is completely consumed by osmosis. In the meantime there is a constant pulmonary motion of eels up the body to the cradle in the torso, where there are always a few hundred spawning in a pool. Hence, the Theem need fear only an internal epidemic or some catastrophe, like a blast of lightning, which might disrupt its form. If it fears.

  Sometimes a Theem abruptly subsides. The body collapses, sloughing eels to the earth. It looks, when it happens, just as if the Theem were succumbing to taedium vitae.

  In Votu:

  Burn watches the mathetes from a rooftop across the street from urchin’s shrine. They trot briskly back along the path through the narrow walled garden that runs along one side. To Burn they are foreshortened, dark and light heads, soft blots of black, some in their shirtsleeves. They are gathering for their supper, she knows. She waits for them to clear out.

  It’s just after sunset. The mountains are pulling back mysteriously, like villains, behind capes of gloom. The spring is still new so the air is fresh and mild, scented with odors of last autumn’s stale leftovers and a custardy smell, like a healing wound, from the ground itself. A ribbon of birds streaks by in silence, boiling flakes in the sky above her. The outermost envelopes of remote music float past. The neighborhood is growing quieter, the lights are strolling away, leaving the buildings dim. Burn cranes forward to get a look at a small group of girls roughly her own age, chaperoned past the shrine by two women and a man. The girls have neat little outfits on. Their words, their piping voices, murmur along with them like familiars. Burn watches them with empirical curiosity. They are well-fed and spend their time in school. They sleep in beds. They are watched constantly. She would make them nervous; not knowing what to do, they would hesitate to speak with her, and shrink from her touch as if she we
re diseased. Having all kinds of inner feelings, they would stiffen and look for a quick way to escape without seeming to escape, to take action. Then later when they were back at the sanctuary they would trade with each other the feelings they had saved, make conversations about her, and turn her into a bad mascot and an insult. Burn doesn’t hate them or envy them, nor does she comprehend them, or understand their superiority.

  A couple strolls into the shrine. Burn waits for them to leave. During the half hour that takes, she turns and sits doubled up, looking up at the sky or out across the city, which is taking on the appearance of a black crusted pool of congealed lava with red fires.

  Inchoate images of those girls performing rituals in their sanctuary pivot in and out of Burn’s imagination. One unusually distinct one involves them leaping, one by one, down from a high platform to the floor. They drift down slowly, feet first, as if they didn’t weigh any more than bubbles. The ribbon trailing from the back of each hat flutters up behind them. Then they take a few bounding steps across a room full of ornaments and waft up to a high vent or something in the opposite wall.

  A dog comes sniffing around the base of the building whose roof she is using. The girls in Burn’s imagination sit bolt upright around a huge table, and adults carrying thousands of dishes of candied food are waiting on them.

  The dog goes on sniffing. The scalloped edge of the awning ripples gently in a gust of wind. The dog scampers off. The couple leave the shrine.

  When they are gone, Burn slips downstairs, crosses the street swiftly, and enters the shrine. She wanted to have another look at urchin, and vaguely to know something about it. Then it occurred to her to dance for it, so she brought her baton. Apart from her slippers and “tardoleo,” the steel baton, with white rubber tips at either end, is her only possession. She crosses the open porch of the shrine and enters through the narrow central door, avoiding the archways that lead to the cells.

  The room Burn now enters is round, and urchin is there, visible through the thin blue curtain embroidered with gold stars that screens its alcove.

  Look around—no one. Go out to the center of the floor, urchin there not fifteen feet away, feeling completely exposed and vulnerable. Burn looks levelly at urchin and, with a nod of her head, she starts dancing for it.

  She does a drum majorette routine, holding her body straight, alternately lifting each leg and then stamping it down, raising and lowering the baton. She spins, twirling the baton so rapidly it buzzes like a hornet, and urchin stirs, responding to her at once. Its whole body rolls in place, nodding like a massive, spiny head protruding through the floor.

  Burn dances until the sweat carves trails in the dust on her face and stands in dirty beads on her cheeks like tears, and her shoulders and throat gleam. Panting, her eyes glazed, she is dancing herself into a state—staring at urchin, now through it, without raising her eyes even when she tosses the baton like a sparkling asterisk high over her head and catches it again as it swoops to the floor.

  Urchin’s tubes undulate and the machine utters a low, harsh drone that rings in the marble. The stars she can see through the doorway now off to her right are snowflakes. The room is a studio with windows along one side, a bare wooden floor, barres, and officials sitting in chairs opposite her. These persons sit as still as figurines and absorb all the light thrown on them by the lamps set on the floor in front of each chair, so she can make out only their humped shadows. Shadows thrown onto the wall behind them. There is almost no light in the studio; the night outside the windows is a tangle of naked tree limbs, pitch blackness, and fluorescent snow, slanting down in streaks, now crashing and bouncing in place like swarming gnats. For the first time in her life, Burn feels as though she is in the presence of her parents. Her father might be behind her—the long shadow in the corner across from the windows watches her dance with what might be fatherly pride. She knows her mother is outside. She’s prowling out there in the snow, the flakes pasted to her hot forehead, and caught in the fray of her hair.

  Burn catches sight of a girl—herself—dancing, from high in the shadows, and through the windows. Her legs lift and drop, her arm rises and falls steadily, the baton glints reflecting snow light, and turns evenly... The fabric of her tardoleo shows the delicate ribs. From time to time she pulls the baton back burring in a rapid twirl past her body and up in an arc into the air, turn to catch it behind her back. Every time she does this there is a tremor, like a weak earthquake, or like something heavy being flung to the floor in a distant room. The building may be collapsing, one room at a time, but there are still many rooms left.

  These moves are followed by mannered bows of the head in formal acknowledgement of what applause? Her parents still feel near, but with some difference. Burn feels her body moving, and knows she still is dancing, but it’s as if she were standing alone in a stone street, lined with small, tomb-like stone houses, wreathed with lianas. There are niches in the walls for slender stone and metal figures, and huge dreaming heads, some bigger than the houses, keep watch with closed eyes and smiles of absence or knowing smiles maybe. It is a calm, still, warm night, with a new moon hanging in the sky like a gigantic coal.

  Now here is a pool in a stone basin. The stars shine in it, and the comet, high overhead, is mirrored nearly in its center. Looking up at the streaming blonde tresses of the comet, she notices a shadow approaching swiftly over the rooftops. She can’t see what casts it, a black moustache on the livid blue slates, and now it travels across the pool—the shadow, cast by some other light source, cast she now sees by a big black bird, flits up and covers the comet’s reflection in the water and in that moment a little person springs from the upright shaft of that shadow in the comet light and the bird that swoops past and disappears in silence behind the roofs. The little person is a nothing more than a transparent whistle of movement, that overtakes her where she stands, making one.

  Racing through the empty streets of the city, high in the mountains. Down on the slope below she sees the inhabited sections and the lights that idly drift along its streets. Meanwhile, four feet or so off the ground, she can see this outline or membrane shooting by, down glowing archways on the dark tile. Black birds all look alike but what kind is that, with the long donkey ears? She’s never seen one like that before (she thinks). Why isn’t that all right? She has seen one like that? As it runs and as it catches the light that form is taking on color and mass, turning into a little blonde girl streaking through the streets. Intense irrepressible thrill to feel her heart slam, her lungs slam, the pistons in her arms and legs pumping, and her eyelids slamming and what else? quick—the thoughts and sensations scatter and chirp and slam so light in her brain like birds—fanfares in her skin, distinctnesses warble out of her nerves, spectral caterwauls shaped like dragonfly wings balloon up her nervous system and then shrink away to nothing in no time—the flat cool nerves plaited into her hands and feet—mouth always trying shapes, sloppy tag-along searching for its shape—dancing and jumping, trying everything in the little courtyard in the early morning in her freshly stolen tardoleo until every movement was precisely controlled.

  Burn stops abruptly with her baton under her arm. Warm snow whirls around her, coming from the natural robot where it sits sighing to itself, a sound like a drinking glass rolling across a rug. She turns unsteadily walking in a straight line, drenched in perspiration, feeling rather than seeing the doorway fleetingly circumferencing her, then she crosses the porch and darts across the street to the safety of the maze. After a while she catches herself just barely wondering how it is that the light is still so blue, and even distinct her wan shadow—twilight all this time? Or was it no time? With a shock she realizes the night is passing off, not coming over, and the sickly azure sheen intensifying over everything precedes the dawn of the next day.

  This building is still in use, no good for sleeping in during the day—try the next. She steps into the street without looking first, and there’s Ester a dozen feet away coming out of an alley.


  Ester sees her at once.

  Brun-Brun! (she shouts, and her face lights savagely)

  That’s Kunty’s nickname for Burn.

  Burn dashes into the next building and up the stairs, feet scraping after her, catching her baton in the banister rail she nearly pitches herself backward—extricates the baton and Ester is scrabbling at the base of the steps.

  The path to the roof is blocked by a heap of furniture—Burn flees down a long hallway putting rooms and folded walls between herself and fresh and cruel Ester.

  Burn picks her way through the litter on the floor and through doorways with light, precisely selected motions even though her legs are hot and numb and she is giddy with fatigue. Finally a wall brings her up short—Ester is cursing in the next room, flinging rubbish out of her way and stops just on the other side of the door. Burn braces herself, raising her heavy baton with ebbing strength and

  You’d better run,

  Ester is saying and

  leaps into the room, toward Burn and

  into flutter and murmur scattering as she comes without dispersing.

  —Ester stops.

  Pigeon girls are gathered around Burn; their hair ruffles out and they hum softly down in their throats. Burn stands there, ready. Ester swipes claws at a girl near to her, to show she means business. There’s a burst of sound and a ripple of motion in answer, but the knot around Burn only tightens. They aren’t running.

  Ester feels their unblinking eyes play over her skin like so many thin streaks of cold water. A billow of fear suddenly rolls down on her. She takes a step back, then pivots and goes on all fours and