Travellers #2 (12 page)

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 pleated 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.

Behind, light leaps in black windows and doors. Misshapen shadows appear and vanish: ten thousand armed dwarfs flying with reflected lamps. I run under the apple tree, knocking aside the over-ripe fruit, spitting at the thought of its rotten taste.

Aspects and vistas of reflections open. Whichever way I look it is down long echoes, a duplicity of mirrors, reflections of Sodomah’s beautiful face which changes into a shrivelled old head of either man or woman, hairless, mouth puckered, hungry-eyed.

Tumult behind. Torches and cries of pursuit. I burst through scented flowerbeds and perfumed shrubs, confront the hedge of iron thorns. Light licks off the armoured spikes.

“Urgsh!” Taur’s voice. The dogs’ barking. Eyes closed, arms over them, I throw myself naked upon the thorns. Staggering, bleeding, find myself between Jak and Jess, and Taur is there snatching my pack.

Overhead the red-flowered trees ignite, twisting pillars of fire that leap in swords of flame. Throw myself under the greatest tree. Fingers dig frantic. A nail tears. Sparks drill my back. The air stinks. Hair burning. The leather cord!
Rip it from the ground. The green stone dolphin around my neck, I follow Taur’s voice, “Urgsh!” into the crescent lake.

The red swords leap and clash, tinge the sapphire water bloody. I weaken. Taur emerges, dumps our packs, returns and drags me out on the far side, red water spilling from our bodies, and I see the wounds of the iron thorns have disappeared.

“Which way?” But Taur is already trotting, still carrying my pack on top of his. My hands clutching their necks, Jak and Jess drag me after him, not back into the desert but east, inland. Sand chimes, rings beneath our feet, then there is just my laboured breathing, the dogs’ panting. “Urgsh!” says Taur.

We came to a rivulet that dwindled and died amongst sand. It appeared again, grew in volume as we followed up towards its beginning in the mountains. I scoured myself all over with handfuls of sand, drew the old tunic over my stinging skin. A lurid glow declined west.

At first light Taur pointed behind. In the direction of Dene, a shaft of smoke lifted a tall tower, nodding as if it spotted us. Far to the north across the desert, a thin scrawl snaked up the air. The sun leapt brazen into the sky, the signals tottered and faded, but I knew we had barely escaped Squint-face and the Salt Men.

The river climbed through rising country. We looked down and saw the back of the great dune above the crescent lake, the long level of the desert. Through the burning madness of that day we sheltered under a cliff. As we started again towards evening, Taur pointed, and I saw dust rising like smoke, imagined a file of dots ascending the back of the dune. By morning they would be in Dene. Squint-face would order the Salt Men to cast a circle about the crescent lake, pick up our tracks.

All night we travelled. When morning came we kept on
between huge ridges of stone, toppled boulders the size of hills. I plaited flax hats to replace those which had dried and cracked unused at Dene. As we travelled upstream, away from the sun’s power, the rivulet grew and spread across its ancient bed to become a broad opal-coloured river.

After the garden of deceptions, it did not seem odd, a river that grew larger as it climbed towards its source. It deepened, and we saw the large silver fish we had eaten in rivers to the north. I leapt on one with my spear, Taur beside me. The dogs fastened their teeth, backed, and helped drag it out. We ate well and dried the remainder of the pink flesh during the day’s heat.

As we marched, distant snow peaks jostled behind the shoulders of the nearer ridges, peering down at us like heads of ice giants. I thought of the mountain that ate the sun, and wondered if we climbed towards that frozen land.

Much bigger now, the river divided into two strands separated by a plain of shingle, one strand clear water, the other – along the northern side of the valley – an even deeper iridescent opal – greenish-blue. For a moment I thought of them as mirrors reflecting each other, shuddered, and put the image out of mind. Each river now carried many times more water than their combined volume downstream.

The wound in my side healed, but our soft feet blistered, left blood on the stones. I wrapped Taur’s and then mine with strips of cloth. When Jak and Jess whimpered, I made little bags, tying them around their paws with wisps of flax. Although they held them up and chewed at them, we made better time.

When we ate the last of the silver fish, Taur shot a deer the dogs brought down off a bushy ridge and across the shingle. Again we fed well, drying the rest of the meat shaved thin and draped on rocks in the scalding sun. That night we continued by moonlight, walking on a crust of sand which broke beneath us, sending up a fine powder. It cracked my
skin and fissured the dogs’ pads. In other places loose gravel shifted under our feet like quicksand.

I wondered had Dene existed? Was Sodomah a dream? How in that house of mirrors had she disguised herself? Why had I not seen the dream for what it was?

And I thought how powerful, the carnal hunger. There had been no end but exhaustion to my appetite. Each night, kissing, shaping her breasts, curving fingers along the line of a shoulder, her naked rump. Each night I was drawn into her body again.

“Who was Sodomah?”

With roars and gestures, Taur told me she was a Salt Woman, an ally of Squint-face, or a slave.

“Why did you suspect her?”

Taur pointed at the ground. “Grawgh.” Somebody leaving Dene. Footprints leading back into the desert. A messenger sent north to Squint-face, to tell him we were there.

“Gaw!” Taur shook his shaggy head. “You talk of Dene as if you were there a long time. It was only a couple of nights.”

Taur was jealous, I knew. I would get no sense out of him on the subject of Sodomah. “But the garden, the house of mirrors?”

“Gaw.” Again Taur shook his head. I dreamt it, he told me.

“You saw the fountains, streams, flowers?”

“Gaw.”

“It was what I’ve dreamed about since leaving the Hawk Cliffs, a place where we could settle and raise crops and animals. We could have been Farmers and Gardeners.”

Taur kept walking. “You imagined it all. Like Sodomah.”

“Why are you lying” I shouted.

Taur shook his head, and walked on.

“But I saw her. She was beautiful.”

Taur stopped. “You saw what you wanted to see.” As if they held a cup, he raised his hands to his lips. “Urp!” He
swallowed. “Argrawgh. The drug helped.”

“Drug?”

“What you drank, the stuff the old crone called wine.”

“You’re just jealous.” As I said the words, I realised how childish they sounded. “You wish you’d seen everything I saw.”

“I saw a crone, and three old Salt Men crippled by ancient wounds. A tumbled wall, one dying tree, and a trickle of dirty water from a sand-choked well. Urgsh!” said Taur, “perhaps what you saw was true for you. And what I saw was my truth.”

I stared at him. “How can truth be different”

“Gwoar.” He shook his head. “But this much I know.” Taur thought for a moment. “Arg. Argaw.”

“Hagar?’

He nodded. “Argaw! Her story. About the crone who lusted after the young hunter and strangled her daughter.”

“Yes?”

“Argawgh. Sodomah,” Taur said. He tried again. “Sodomah was the crone. She drugged you, made you fall in love with her. You thought she was Tara.”

A thrill of anger stiffened my arm, but Taur turned and strode on. Over his shoulder he said, “Urgsh! There was a meaning to the story. A warning against your betrayal by a woman. Old Hagar understood your weakness.”

“Oh, shut up!” I was grateful to Taur for saving us from Squint-face, annoyed he was right, most of all annoyed with myself.

Taur grinned and marched on beside the opal river. Jak and Jess behind him. I had trouble keeping up. Once at a crossing they had to wait for me when the river lifted me off my feet, swept me downstream. Taur knew I would be angry if he offered to swim back and help me, sat there with Jak and Jess, grinning to himself.

I caught up, and he tramped ahead again. “Garawgh!”
he bellowed into the rumble of the opal river, “Garawgh aw garaw urf!” Singing the old Travellers’ song I had taught him. I suspected he was adding words of his own that told of my stupidity. Jak and Jess looked up at his yells and shouts, grinning as if they enjoyed the joke, too.