The Cloven Read online

  B. CATLING

  The Cloven

  B. Catling is a poet, sculptor, painter, and performance artist. He makes installations and paints portraits of imagined Cyclopes in egg tempera. Catling has had solo shows at the Serpentine Gallery, London; the Arnolfini in Bristol, England; the Ludwig Museum in Aachen, Germany; Hordaland Kunstnersentrum in Bergen, Norway; Project Gallery in Leipzig, Germany; the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England; and several solo shows at Matt’s Gallery, London.

  In 2015 he won the Cholmondeley Award from The Society of Authors for his poetic works. He was also elected to become a Royal Academician. He is Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, and an Emeritus Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford.

  He is the author of The Vorrh and The Erstwhile.

  ALSO BY B. CATLING

  The Vorrh

  The Erstwhile

  A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, JULY 2018

  Copyright © 2018 by Brian Catling

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Catling, B. (Brian), author.

  Title: The cloven : a novel / by B. Catling.

  Description: New York : Vintage Books, [2018] | Identifiers: LCCN 2017048950 (print) | LCCN 2017052234 (ebook)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction. | Science fiction. | Occult fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6053.A848 (ebook) | LCC PR6053.A848 C58 2018 (print) | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017048950

  Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9781101972748

  Ebook ISBN 9781101972755

  Cover design by Pablo Delcan

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v5.3.1

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  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by B. Catling

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Part Two

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Part Three

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  In loving memory of Rebecca Hind

  Where is the soul of a termite, or the soul of man?…Someone once said that all behaviourism in nature could be referred to as hunger. This saying has been repeated thousands of times yet is false. Hunger itself is pain—the most severe pain in its later stages that the body knows except thirst, which is even worse. Love may be regarded as a hunger, but it is not pain.

  EUGÈNE MARAIS,

  The Soul Of the White Ant

  Nebuchadnezzar was living in his palace in peace and prosperity when he had a strange dream that troubled him. None of his diviners and magicians were able to explain it for him, and he called for Daniel, chief of all his wise men. This is the dream: The king saw a great tree at the centre of the earth, its top touching heaven, visible to the ends of the earth, and providing food and shelter to all the creatures of the world. As the king watched he saw a “holy watcher” come from heaven and call for the tree to be cut down and his human mind changed to that of a beast for seven “times.”

  Summary of Daniel 4 based on the translation of C. L. Seow in his commentary on Daniel

  A man without a moral code is just an appetite.

  PETER BLEGVAD,

  “King Strut”

  PROLOGUE

  Noontide repayeth never morning-bliss—

  Sith noon to morn is incomparable;

  And, so it be our dawning goth amiss,

  None other after-hour serveth well.

  Ah! Jesu-Moder, pitie my oe paine—

  Dayspring mishandled cometh not againe!

  RUDYARD KIPLING, “Gertrude’s Prayer”

  Eugène Nielen Marais had sat silently for more than an hour watching the ground, sheltering under the long veranda, tucked into the blind spot of the house, not yet wanting to be seen. If the farmer had poked his nose outside and seen the fatigued man, he would have concluded that he was locked in deepest thought again, because that was what he was famous for, often while wandering in the bush around Pretoria. He had just made his way up from the Prellers’ farm. His daily supply of morphine had not been replenished and he was miles from anybody who could help, if indeed those people existed at all. This was not a surprise, he had seen it coming like the constant squalls of rain that saturated the land. He wondered if it was but part of his subconscious plan. There was nothing here to help him; he enjoyed the remoteness of the farmhouse, knowing that too much contact with humans might deflect his purpose now. He needed the clarity of ants and the passion of baboons to battle the cramps and shout down the sweltering cold pain.

  The black ants that made the ground writhe were not the kind that he had studied. They had not yet entered his brain, which would literally happen before the present hour was spent. But now, while watching, he let his sight go deeper—the tethers to actual meaning stretched beyond need. He saw a movement beneath the ants, a movement in the earth itself, as if the very particles were alive or infested with something of great power and invisibility. A kind of focus that lived independently. Like water that
had seeped into the matrix of solidity. This wild scrubland seemed to seethe with a force that would cleanse or bleach every living thing, giving a whiteness to all, forcing all nuance and ingenious time into submission. The idea chilled his blood and sent an involuntary shudder chasing after the ghost of the morphine. For a fraction of a second he remembered a child’s dream of a terrifying whiteness. He stood up and walked to the other side of the house. His bones ached and he could barely climb the wooden steps. He knocked on the sun-faded door that was now sodden with rain. The farmer took his time answering. Eventually he appeared at the threshold and glared at the gaunt figure of Eugène Marais: lawyer, poet, drug addict, who would one day, years after this meeting, be hailed as a visionary and a genius.

  “There’s a snake in the thorn tree,” said Marais, trembling.

  The farmer just looked at him.

  “At the rondavels, it’s eating the birds.”

  The sound of the long rain hissed between then, amplified by the corrugated tin roof of the simple building. The farmer stared a little deeper.

  “Do you have a rifle I could use to kill it?”

  “Take a shotgun. You can’t shoot a snake with a rifle, you should know that,” said the farmer.

  The men looked at each other for a long while with no more words to say, before the farmer turned back into the house to retrieve the gun from its rack, which bristled with others. It was one of his best, a handsome well-used double-barrel 12-gauge. He loaded it as he slowly returned to Marais. They nodded and the gun was exchanged.

  They walked together for a short while into the wet, sour grass. Marais had missed the path and the farmer understood. He stopped and turned back so that Marais could walk on alone. Alone with a vision that confirmed his regret about humanity, a vision a millionfold stronger than his own human frailty.

  Marais walked less than another hundred yards before he closed the shotgun and cocked its hammers. He turned it in his shaking hands, holding it like a paddle, gripping the oiled barrel, keeping the butt end of the stock away from him as if ready to row and steer his way along a stream that only he could see. He straightened the gun, resting the twin holes on his chest, and put his thumb in the trigger guard. Some part of him smiled at it as the sun poked out of the clouds and he turned sideways into its light. He hoped that the farmer would ignore the shot and that by the time they came looking for him, most if not all of his earthly remains would have been removed by wild dogs or hyenas. Under his feet the wet ground dipped. A previous subsidence in the tunnels of other creatures had caused the surface to smoothly hollow. He stumbled a quarter pace, slithered the barrel, and fumbled the trigger, sending the resounding thunder glancing through the side of his rib cage. The heavy fist bludgeoned and ripped at an inch or two of his lung and sent splinters of bone to dart and embroider the skin and silk that had contained them. The gun fell away as he spun backwards into the soaking knee-high grass. The morphine ghost shrank, hiding away from the pain as Marais groaned and wrestled the bloodstained gravity and terse plants, crawling through them to try to find the gun. And suddenly he remembered Cyrena Lohr and the letter that he had written to her. Saw it on the table curling in the sunlight next to the empty box that he was going to gift the mechanical crown in. He had been delighted in finding her dream object, her halo of insects. He had found it inside one of the most treasured magical artifacts that survived the Possession Wars. A great sickness of pain and guilt rose up in him. He knew that his servants would find the crown, the box, and the letter and send them to her. And he knew the terrors that could happen if she wound its motors and placed it on her head. He now had another reason to die quickly.

  The sound of the shot echoed out and over everything with ears, and a few without, for miles—their keen activities and their shallow sleep halted for a second or two. Heads lifted to gauge the distance and direction. The scavengers moved first. The farmer looked out towards the shot and the place where the visionary had disappeared into a blurred focus.

  Marais’s sticky fingers touched the barrel again, dragging it closer. One shot left, he knew he did not have the strength to miss again. Half sitting, he edged the gun closer until he could bite onto its end, tasting the fresh cordite, gun oil, and gritty earth. The shaking white hand seeking the shaking black trigger, which waited alert and as sensitive as the antenna of an ant.

  * * *

  —

  The remote farm Pelindaba where he took his life is now unrecognisable. In Zulu, Pelindaba means “the end of the business”—although the more common interpretation is “place of great gatherings.”

  Pelindaba is derived from the words “pelile,” meaning “finished,” and “indaba” meaning “discussion.” The whole area is now dominated by the 2,300 hectares of the Nuclear Research Centre. The home of South Africa’s atomic bombs.

  Part One

  CHAPTER ONE

  The patience of the Sea People was about to be rewarded. They sacrificed and prayed in their homes and temples and at the estuary’s mouth, where the waters changed colour and taste. They conjured the return of the magic creature that lived among them before. It had been called Oneofthewilliams because there were many. Some had black skin and silver hair, some were as white as fish. It was even told that some had feathers. One had carried a bow. Another had one eye.

  Sidrus knew little about and cared less for these pagans or their beliefs. He had killed the Bowman Peter Williams, and years later had been tricked into eating his shrivelled head, which seated its longing deep in his marrow and its waking in the empty ventricles of the monster’s leather soul. Now it was waking up. But this he did not know. All he knew now was revenge, as he ravenously sought Nebsuel—the shaman who had dared to attempt to assassinate him, who left him diseased and weakened. But the head had cured him, made him strong again. He was saved, he thought, by his beloved Vorrh. He truly believed that his destiny was his own. His only immediate task and pleasure was to take his revenge. He had sworn an oath to this fine fury before leaving Essenwald. His destruction of Ishmael’s whore, and his blame and execution for the crime, were as nothing to what he was going to do to Nebsuel.

  Sidrus’s anger blinded him to the being growing in the quieter part of his cells. The transparent one that basked and clenched and responded to the call of the Sea People.

  Sidrus was being pulled. And he didn’t know it. His slender boat veered in a graceful misdirection that notched a degree east every quarter of an hour. So that by the time the sea flowed under the river it was dark again and the implicit Cheshire moon showed nothing, with a modesty that was fiercely believable.

  Sidrus made his camp and lay down to sleep. The remains of the head slid silently inside him while ghosting itself into every fibre and energy of its host, grafting its being into the nerve tree, bone, and blood.

  Sidrus awoke just before dawn covered in ants. He rubbed his eyes and stretched, brushing their activity from his face and clothing. During repacking he noticed that the sun was bedraggled in the thick vines of the wrong kind of trees. He walked like a somnambulist to his boat and found it facing a dribble of tide that had dropped several feet, and worse, seaweed had decorated its mooring rope. This was all wrong. He sat on a fallen tree, bewildered and for the first time anxious. A flight of black swans thrashed against a thick and cloudless blue sky. All these clear signs and impossible readings meant only one thing: that this place was utterly different to the one that lived in his head and, even worse, his instinct. It did not fit into either and meant nothing to both.

  He was lost.

  He rummaged madly in his pack, finding his compass, staring at it and shaking it in disbelief. At the height of his infuriation he bellowed out what should have been a roar of frustrated rage. But something in his throat realigned it, bending the vocal cords to mimic a harp instead of a war horn. The sound shimmered through the trees, towards the sea—high, resolute, and profoundly clear. Sid
rus grabbed at his throat as if seizing a traitor, but it was too late. The eloquent call dashed ahead, tumbling in its sleek surety and need to be heard. Through the hissing bamboo and the dark sucking mangroves, its shredded velocity leaving all the verticals and diminishing towards the beach. Its last quiver feebly touching the inside of the fair-haired child’s hollow cranium.

  Tyc, her rumpled ear wedged tight against the ear of the cold infant, heard the strangled cry. Over the years her name had shortened, indicating her venerable, wise status. The young had very long names, some up to fifty-two syllables. This was to hold them firmly in the world. To tie and bind them to this side of eternity. As they got older and more firmly instated, they needed less, so mother Tyc’s single syllable indicted that she was prepared and unfettered, ready to make the slip into the next kingdom. In reality she had no intention of passing over for a good while yet, especially now that the sacred one was arriving. The future of the tribe had changed and she wanted to be part of it. She even considered recalling some of the shed parts of her name to make her plans to the tribe more obvious, but after consideration she thought that it would be ridiculous and without necessity.