Skorgen Kaban clumped into view from amidships. ‘Seen it, Cap’n!’
‘Swing her out, Pretty. If it’s gonna bite, best we lock jaws with it.’ The thought of the storm throwing Undying Gratitude on to that treefall shore wasn’t a pleasant one, not in the least.
The black wire-wool cloud seemed to be coming straight for them.
‘Piss in the boot, this dance won’t be fun.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
This is ancient patience
belly down on the muds
lining the liana shore.
Everyone must cross
rivers in high flood.
Bright blossoms float
past on the way down
to the snake mangroves
harbouring the warm sea.
But nothing slides smooth
into the swirling waters
hunting their bold beauty.
We mill uneasy on the verge
awaiting necessity’s
paroxysms-the sudden rush
to cross into the future.
Rivers in high flood
dream of red passages
and the lizards will feed
as they have always done.
We bank on numbers,
the chaotic tumult,
the frenzied path on the backs
of loved ones, fathers and
mothers, the quill-lickers
inscribing lists of lives:
this solid stand, that
slippage of desire.
Ancient patience swells
the tongue, all the names
written in tooth-row jaws-
we surge, we clamber eyes
rolling and the distant shore
calls to us, that ribbed future
holds us a place in waiting.
But the river scrolls down
high in its hungry season
and the lizards wallow fat
in the late afternoon sun.
See me now in the fleck
of their lazy regard-and
now I wait with them,
for the coming rains
The season of high flood, Gamas Enictedon
Children will wander. they will walk as if the future did not exist. Among adults, the years behind one force focus upon what waits ahead, but with children this is not so. The past was a blur of befuddled sensations, the future was white as the face of the sun. Knowing this yielded no comfort. Badalle was still a child, should one imagine her of a certain age, but she walked like a crone, tottering, hobbling. Even her voice belonged to an old woman. And the dull, fused thing behind her eyes could not be shaken awake.
She had a vague recollection, a memory or an invention, of looking upon an ancient woman, a grandmother perhaps, or a great aunt. Lying shrunken on a bed, swaddled in wool blankets. Still breathing, still blinking, still listening. And yet those eyes, in their steady watching, their grainy observation, showed nothing. The stare of a dying person. Eyes spanning a gulf, slowly losing grip on the living side of the chasm, soon to release and slide to the side of death. Did those eyes feed thoughts? Or had things reduced to mere impressions, blobs of colour, blurred motions-as if in the closing of death one simply returned to the way things had been for a newborn? She could think of a babe’s eyes, in the moments and days after arriving in the world. Seeing but not seeing, a face of false smiles, the innocence of not-knowing.
She had knelt beside a nameless boy, there on the very edge of the Crystal City, and had stared into his eyes, knowing he saw her, but knowing nothing else. He was beyond expression (oh, the horror of that, to see a human face beyond expression, to wonder who was trapped inside, and why they’d given up getting out). He’d studied her in turn-she could see that much-and held her gaze, as if he’d wanted company in his last moments of life. She would not have turned away, not for anything. The gift was small for her, but all she had, and for him, perhaps it was everything.
Was it as simple as that? In dying, did he offer, there in his eyes, a blank slate? Upon which she could scribble anything she liked, anything and everything that eased her own torment?
She’d find those answers when her death drew close. And she knew she too would remain silent, watchful, revealing nothing. And her eyes would look both beyond and within, and in looking within she would find her private truths. Truths that belonged to her and no one else. Who cared to be generous in those final moments? She’d be past easing anyone else’s pain.
And this was Badalle’s deepest fear. To be so selfish with the act of dying.
She’d not even seen when the life left the boy’s eyes. Somehow, that moment was itself a most private revelation. Recognition was slow, uncertainty growing leaden as she slowly comprehended that the eyes she stared into gave back not a single glimmer of light. Gone. He is gone. Sunlight cut paths through the prisms of crystal walls, giving his still face a rainbow mask.