The Vorrh Page 2

  By the time the British officers had arrived, they found a squalid churn of destruction. Everything that had been achieved with, or given to, the natives had been intentionally eradicated, mangled back into their own stinking, senseless history. Tsungali stood at the centre of the carnage, triumphant and exhilarated, wearing only his tunic jacket and his peak cap, ridiculously turned inside out. Feathers, bones, and cartridges were entangled in his hair, and his teeth had been resharpened.

  Before this, when the colonial forces had first appeared, they were mysterious and powerful. Their ignorance of the world was forgiven. The quantity of wonderful goods they brought and the manner of their arrival startled the True People. Cautiousness made their hands hesitate and quiver over the treasures they were offered. There were gifts for everybody. Tsungali and his brothers watched their kindness with distrust and bewilderment, watched the endless flow of impossible things: animal meat in hard, shiny shells without bones, killing irons of great power and accuracy, rainbows of cloth, talking cages, and a swarm of other things and powers with no name.

  When the strangers were given permission to cut the trees and shave the ground, nobody could have expected the consequences. Tsungali had seen the first ones in the sky when he was small. They floated belly side up like a dead lizard in a pool, streaking the sky with straight white lines. Tsungali asked his grandfather what they were, those dagger birds with long voices. His grandfather saw nothing, heard nothing; the sky was empty; they did not exist. There was no template in his perceptions for such a thing. And, if some did see something, then it must be from another world, and therefore dangerous and best left alone. The magicians said they were the dreams of young fathers still to be born, and that their growing frequency told of a vast future fertility. No one had an explanation when one came down to nest on the shaved strip in the jungle; the strangers simply had great power to be able to catch one so easily. Tsungali walked to the clearing with his grandfather, hand in hand. They stood and stared at the gleaming hard bird. Its shell was the same as the shell around the meat without bones. The old man shivered slightly and saw only the clearing with the strangers hurrying back and forth. He saw them because they were men, or creatures in the shape of men.

  The excited child stepped forward but was yanked into a standstill by the old man’s rigidity. He was rooted to the spot and his tugging grandson would not unbind him. The boy knew better than to argue, and tears of frustration filled his eyes. The old man wept too. One solitary tear crept through the scars of his face, through the diagrams of constellations and the incised maps of influence and dominion. A liquid without name, it being made of so many emotions and conflicts, each cancelling the other out until only salt and gravity filled the moment and moved down through his expression.

  The airplane was full of possessions, more than had ever been seen before; astonishing things that made the young feel rich and honoured, making them far greater than neighbouring tribes, who had nothing. The plane also carried a priest. Over the next few years, the strangers settled in and brought families and new belief to the village. They said they had changed, coming from different lands now with different ways of speaking, but this seemed untrue, like so many other things that were discovered later. They instructed the True People in the way of the one world, with its god that was ashamed of nakedness. They taught them how work might bring them those precious things that were previously given. They brought books and singing and exchanged the splendour of an invisible god for all their carved deities of wood and stone. And somewhere in that sickly trade, suspicion became woven into the fabric of trust. The insistence of guilt was converted into the notion that the True People must have already paid the price for something, something they had never received, something that just might be possessions.

  The airstrip was carefully maintained and the goods continued to arrive. The empty planes were filled with the disgrace of their vanquished homes. Old weapons, clothing, gods, and kitchen tools were stacked inside to be sent away, shabby totems of a discarnate history, expelled. Clean pictures, metal furniture, and uniforms filled their spaces, or at least appeared to.

  The flint to the great conflagration was a man named Peter Williams.

  Peter Williams had joined the far-flung outpost just after the rainy season. His journey there had begun in conception. Khaki bedsheets, stained dark by khaki spunk, his father having carried the rifle and the flag for three generations. There had never been any doubt; he was to be a soldier. From the day of his birth to the day of his disappearance, there was only ever one road.

  A great yellow sun had spun in the bluest of Wiltshire skies. His birth had been abrupt and easy, his brilliant red head bouncing in the warm light. The sun was always to be his principle, and he sought to embrace it.

  He had been given a choice of posts, and the remote backwater was his most favoured. He desperately wanted to escape Europe, and England. The scars left by the gutting rope of the Great War were still fresh, if those words could ever be used in the same sentence. The rotting trenches had carved gangrene into the heart of the old countries, which clung together like so many old maids in a storm, friends and foes alike. He had been in a slithering ditch at Passchendaele for two years, where no sun ever warmed the forsaken earth. When there was daylight, it was contaminated and heavy, so that it hung densely on the black thorn hooks of splintered trees, the few verticals in a sea of mud, smoke, flesh, and metal. The only clear light he remembered was the light that had not existed. He had been one of those who witnessed spectral visions floating over the smeared remains of men and mules. Angels of the Somme, they had been called. An illumination of purity, squeezed out of corruption to flicker in the wastelands. He never really knew what he had seen, but it had helped him survive and erase the impossible reality of that carnage.

  At the age of twenty-three, he had been ready for a far-off land of heat and life. From the moment he’d stepped from the plane and onto the rough-shaved clearing, he had felt satisfaction, as if the place had greeted him with a smile. There was something about the aroma of the jungle and the humidity, something about the teeming life that pulsed in every inch of the land, that had reassured him. Perhaps it was the ecstasy of opposites or the certainty that what he had witnessed could never happen there. Whatever it was he inhaled into his soul that day, it had grown stronger as he had walked through the singing rain forest to the barracks, with the step of a prodigal son.

  The outpost was to the southeast of the Vorrh, two hundred miles from the city and two thousand years away. The tribe who owned the enclosure had been there since the Stone Age; their land was an isthmus at the mouth of the great river, which ran from the sea to be swallowed by the great forest. They said it was the other way around, that the forest bled from its heart to invent and maintain the sea. They called themselves the True People, and they had been that forever.

  The sublimation of the True People had led to the survival of their race and the obliteration of their meaning. As the twentieth century had made its entrance, it was deemed necessary and desirable to focus on the tribe’s development, especially if the trade route via the river was to thrive after a long period of poverty. Three European countries had forcibly assisted their evolution. The British were the last to join the noble crusade, and they did it with their characteristic munitions of charm, cynicism, and armed paternal control.

  The outpost was an elaborate undertaking. When he had arrived they were just finishing the roof of the church, complete with a joyless bell to summon the newly converted. There were six professional soldiers, two with families. A priest and a dozen bush policemen, aged between forty-two and fifteen, had been wrangled from the more significant members of the tribe. They took their positions very seriously. What they actually policed was a matter of speculation, since no set of formal laws had been introduced, and the previous mechanisms of agreed existence were fast being rubbed out. At least that’s what the invaders had believed.

  Williams had been an ar
mourer in the Great War, and he was there to equip and train the new police force with weapons beyond their expectations. He had arrived with a cargo of arms and ammunition, which he lovingly unpacked from their solid crates.

  All the hopeless carnage he’d experienced only proved to him that greed, pride, and blindness, once rolled together, created a mechanism of appalling velocity, and that humans outside of imagination are best kept caged and regulated by severe controls. Never, in all the conflict and the infinity of wounds, had his love and enthusiasm for the firearms changed. Yes, these beautifully designed and crafted machines had only one purpose, but they did not breed it. He knew that their sole purpose, the taking of life, would have been operated anyway, even if the tools at hand had been sharpened sticks and heavy stones. Indeed, he had seen trench warfare move into hand-to-hand combat, where the bayonet was too distant a weapon, where handmade clubs and honed steel had hacked flesh apart in slippery, sightless fury. If men were to be butchered, then better it be done professionally, with a precise tool in skilled hands. With this dislocation as a balm, he could continue.

  He had been unpacking a crate of Lee-Enfield rifles when he realised, to his surprise, that they were not reconditioned stock as expected, but a batch of gleaming new models in mint condition. In fact, none of the order had matched his paperwork at all. Among them was a special prize, a Gabbett-Fairfax Mars pistol. A self-loading semiautomatic with an astonishing ballistic power, it looked like an axe or a hammer and possessed a rudimentary L of a body, an ugly, unique elegance of top-heavy dense steel, smooth and uncluttered. The rear end of the pistol was infested with a knurled mechanical contrivance of the breech, hammer, and sights. The Mars was intended for military mass production, but it entered the world backwards, and at the wrong time. It came with the same consideration that sent the mounted cavalry into the gas and machine guns of the First World War, with the pedigree of a medieval killing field: It could stop a horse. It sounded like the end of the world. Its recoil could break the shooter’s wrist and spit hot, spent cartridge cases back into his face. The imagined accuracy was never achieved because its marksman, having taken the first shot, shivered and flinched so greatly before squeezing the trigger that it was impossible to aim. It was the most powerful pistol ever conceived or constructed at the turn of that century, and nobody ever wanted to use it. Fewer than a hundred were manufactured.

  He understood little of the local people. Their language was impenetrable, their ways oblique, and though their humanity was blatant from the beginning, all of their methods were questionable. But he had begun to be fascinated by the way they watched without looking, bemused by their laughter, which seemed disconnected to events, and intrigued by their shock at new objects and gestures. In fact, his curiosity was fusing him to them in direct proportion to the extent that he was becoming separated from all the other colonists of the outpost. He had not known this. His day-to-day work of demonstrating the weapons and organising target practice had consumed introspection and nullified his nagging doubts. It was only the incident with a girl named Este that forced his dislocation and pinned him up against isolation and the threat of court-martial.

  Williams knew that the Dutch priest was a man of one gear: forward. A dauntless missionary, he had finished his church in a record two months. It was filled with the faithful every day, or at least what looked like the faithful. But on this day it sounded woefully empty as he stood outside, sheepishly peering into the moaning interior. A group of onlookers had started to form around the newly painted entrance steps, and the abnormality could be heard by nearly the whole village.

  “Padre, what’s wrong?” asked the first of the senior officers to arrive at the priest’s side.

  “It’s one of the women,” he replied. “She has gone mad.”

  The lieutenant pushed past the priest and opened the double doors to take control. The church still smelt of paint, its whiteness disorientating and off-key. In the aisle, halfway to the altar, a young woman knelt on the floor, surrounded by books, with one heavy foolscap tome open before her. She was naked and menstruating heavily. A low, inhuman groan rumbled constantly from deep inside her, the kind of sound that is heard at a distance, from the centre of a glacier, or lethally close, when it growls from the sleek, unseen darkness of a big cat.

  The lieutenant looked back to the priest and understood his reticence. “It’s only a girl,” he said, the greatest lie he could manage, because he, too, had begun to shrink back in fear. His testicles were sucked up into his pelvis and his hair was standing on end. Whatever was in the church was a girl only in the curves of its black surface: Its essence and action were not from the known world. What was in the girl was altogether alien to a trained modern mind, and it was rewriting the rules of phenomena in a language that had an irremediable taste of pure terror.

  A second officer and a group of onlookers had begun to bustle at the entrance of the church. The officer had a revolver in his hand already and had pushed it through the door like a crucifix, ready to dominate anything into submission. He saw a blur that shivered. Its sound unbound him, made him want to flee. He smelt the fear of all those around him, and his bladder started to weaken and leak. Pointing his shaking defence down the length of the aisle at the hideous black confusion, he shut his eyes and squeezed the trigger.

  Nothing happened. The hammer had dropped, but only onto the flesh of the left-hand ring finger of Peter Williams. He had grabbed the pistol and restricted the action, twisting it around and down, forcing his colleague to his knees in yelps of pain. He took the gun away and tucked it into his belt. After looking down the aisle for a moment, he walked to the young woman, knelt beside her, and closed the book. The silence was instant, the fears and shuddering vanishing immediately.

  “Coat,” he called back to the door.

  Moments later one had arrived and was brought almost to him, it being thrown for the last few feet. He covered the girl and helped her to stand, then slowly escorted her from the church, a trail of blood left on the new floor. Once outside, he had expected her to walk off or to be collected by one of her own. But this did not happen. Instead, every time he stopped, so did she; when he moved, she began to walk. So they walked out of the camp together, and thirty minutes later they were deep in the bush.

  It was then that he stopped to look at her, wiping the sweat from his face with the backs of his hands. She was now calm and without the faintest sign of perspiration. Lifting her head, she stared through him, her eyes the colour of opals, bright and unnervingly clear as they gazed into a distance that he preferred to ignore. Then she spoke a word that seemed out of sequence with her mouth: “Irrinipeste.”

  He did not understand until she said it again. He heard it deep in the back of his head, in a place where the old brain skulked. Only part of it clung, and he repeated it: “Este.”

  She nodded a kind of agreement and waited. To hear his name, perhaps? He said it slowly. Halfway through its second pronouncement, she started to twitch, then shake. He thought that perhaps she was going to spasm again; the blood was flowing down her legs at an alarming rate. But she gathered herself and walked forward, pulling him behind her.

  They walked on, into a clearing with six or seven large and ornately decorated dwellings. A few chickens scurried about in their passing, and a peacock watched them and shrilled. He looked about them and was ready to call out, when the old man was suddenly there. His tattooed and bangled arms held out for the girl. She folded into them and let Williams leave the clearing. As he looked back, he saw her beauty standing between them. It was detached, older, and breathtaking.

  Tsungali unwound his sitting body and dropped soundlessly to stand, waiting a few seconds before he was called inside. Slow-motion dust clouded around his long, shoeless feet. He walked behind the soldier who escorted him to the barracks door. As he entered, the soldier grabbed at the Enfield, gripping it midway. Tsungali barked a word or a sound that was a crossbreeding of multiple ferocities, one taken from c
ats and snakes, birds and winds. The hand sprang back to hang limp and tingling, as if electrocuted, at the terrified soldier’s shivering side. Tsungali’s eyes drummed the officer’s attention. He swallowed his contempt and waved him away. The shivering soldier left the room.

  Tsungali walked in and smelt himself there years before, the rush of memories filling the hollows of his previous nervous system. For so it is among those who shed lives every few years: They keep their deflated interior causeways, hold them running parallel with their current usable ones; ghost arteries, sleeping shrunken next to those that pump life. Hushed lymphatics, like quiet ivy alongside the speeding juice of now. Nerve trees like bone coral, hugging the whisper of bellowing communications.

  That old part of him swelled with an essence of himself before, nudging the now in a physical déjà vu, becoming two in the stiff interior of his body, ignoring the even stiffer officer who glared in his direction. The overhead fan waded in the congealed air, stirring heartbeats of a larger beast and giving rhythm to the mosquitoes queuing to taste the sweating white skin of the officer, who choked out, “You have been asked to come here”—the claws of the word “asked” scratched the inside of his throat—“for a very special purpose.”

  Night and insects.

  “We are looking for someone to hunt a man, someone we can trust. Someone with all the skills, a bushman warrior.”

  “Trust” nipped at Tsungali’s balls and diaphragm.

  Even the officer heard the condescension, and it halted him, giving him time to look more appraisingly at the man before him. He was tall but slightly bent. His formidable skeleton had been broken and repaired many times. The flesh and muscle were hard, dark meat, pliant and overused, solid. The skin was losing its once blue-black sheen, a faint grey opalescence dusting its vitality. The uniform was worn-out and rearranged, mended into another version of itself, turned into how he had wanted it to be: the opposite of its function of uniformity and rank. Its blueness was waning, building a visual alliance with the man’s skin. He looked like a shadow in the room and perhaps he was: a static shadow being cast by what was now happening in his swirling being, a gap of light spun out of a space in time.