THE VORRH by Brian Catling (Extract)
THE VORRH by Brian Catling (Extract)
THE VORRH by Brian Catling (Extract)
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chapter one
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The Vorrh11
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other is wrapped away and saved to be the last. She said it was
for another to shoot, a bowman who would come after me. I will
make all the other arrows.
This was her last instruction. I draw the bow back with all my
strength and feel this single gesture brace every muscle of my body,
feel the tension lock in as the grace of the string touches my lips. I
feel as if the world stops to hold its breath. I raise the bow skywards.
The arrow lets itself go, vanishing into the sky with a sound
that sensually pulses through me and every other particle of
substance and ghost, in or out of sight.
It is still travelling the spirals of air, sensing a defined blood
on its ice-cold tip. For a moment I am with it, high above these
porous lands, edging the sea, its waves crashing endlessly below.
Above the shabby villages and brutal tribes, singing towards the
Vorrh. This arrow is in advance of my foreseen journey into the
depth of the forest, but it will never be my guide. She said that it
was for me, but never to follow.
The pain calls me back as I stand dazed in the garden. The
inside of my arm is raw from where the bowstring lashed it,
removing a layer of skin with the ease of a razor, indifferent and
intentional. Stepping forward, I pick up my sack and quiver,
steady my looping stance against the bow, and begin to walk
into the inevitable.
c
Tsungali sat, a lone black man on the mud parapet wall of a colonial stockade.
Far to the south, twilight was tasting the air. Swallows darted
and looped in the invisible fields of rising insects, restless arrowheads spinning in the amber sunlight. One moment, black silhouette, Iron Age. The next, tilting to catch the sun, flashing
deep orange, Bronze Age. Dipping and rotating in giddying
time: Iron Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age.
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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.
c
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.
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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 hed 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
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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 tribes 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-t wo 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 thats what the invaders had
believed.
Williams had been an armourer 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 hed experienced only proved to
him that greed, pride, and blindness, once rolled together, created a mechanism of appalling velocity, and that humans out-
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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, whats wrong? asked the first of the senior officers
to arrive at the priests side.
Its 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
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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. Its 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
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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.
c
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others as the hut, and the spirit mast above it, collapsed about
the squatting figure in the smoke.
Nobody had understood the incident then, even the invaders who said prayers for the fire and for his cousins soul. That
understanding would take several years to fully ripen.
It was after that debacle that they had made Tsungali a policeman. To balance things, he thought, and because hed never
accepted one of the solid Bibles. He was an excellent policeman
from the first day, obeying all orders and achieving all of his
tasks. It was simpler than it lookedhe explained to his people
what they must be seen to do, they agreed, and so it was done,
and the new masters believed their wishes had been carried out.
So good was he, in the eyes of his masters, that three years later
they rewarded him by flying him from his land into theirs, a
long and meaningless journey to show him the magnificence
of their origins. By the time he had arrived in the grand European metropolis, he was without compass, gravity, or direction;
his shadow had remained behind, bewildered and gazing at the
empty sky.
They dressed him in smooth cloth and polished his hair.
They put gloves on his feet and pointed boots; they called him
John. They took him into great halls to meet many people; he
had conducted his duties perfectly, they said. He was trustworthy, they said, a new generation of his clan, a prize in their
empire.
He just watched and closed his ears to the drone of their
voices. He touched everything, felt texture and colour to remember the difference, the size, and the fact that all things there were
worn down, smoothed out, and shiny, as if a sea of a million
people had rubbed against the wood and the stone, curving its
splinters and hushing its skin. The food they gave him made his
mouth jump and sting, burnt him inside and skewered him so
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formed elders got down onto his knees, nose almost touching
the glass, to come closer to a carved manifestation of Linqqu,
goddess of fertility and the fields.
On the far wall were pictures. Almost in a trance, he walked
closer to these, into a memory of his village, pinned to the wall
and drained of colour. This was the final sacrilege; the exposure
of the sacred, the dead, and the souls of the living.
His sponsors were enjoying his visit, pleased with his attentive
behaviour. They watched as he stared at a photograph of an elder
of his tribe sitting before an elaborately carved dwelling. It was a
significant image of anthropological value, a first-contact document that showed an uninterrupted culture in domestic vigour.
Tsungali stared at his grandfather. The old man had never been
photographed before, and hed had no idea why the stranger was
covering his face and shaking the box at him. Sitting on the steps
of their longhouse, legs holding an animal-tailed flyswatter, the
other hand quietly trying to cover his balls; his expression was
confused, his head cocked slightly to see around the box, trying
to look at the photographers face. His grandfathers eyes and
mouth had just been wounded by strangeness; he was too dazed
and absent to ward off the event. The outside of the longhouse
was encrusted with climbing, crawling, and gesturing spirits.
All of their carved and painted faces were alive, talking to the
stranger, laughing at his manner.
The old man looked through the box, through the stranger,
through to his reflection, and appeared to shudder. The doorway to the house was dark, but another figure could just be
seen inside. A boy, happy and grinning, all teeth and eyes in
the darkness, open, smiling amazement. It was Tsungali, caught
young, and in opposition to his beloved grandfathers nakedness, bewilderment, and pain.
Tears filled his eyes as he secretly begged the print to move,
to turn away or turn back, to do anything but confront his
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c
I set my path by the night and walk out of the village, the velocity of the moonlight polishing the miles ahead.
I walk between banked walls of white stone as if in an empty
riverbed, a road hollowed out by time, weather, and the continual passage of humans, as migratory as birds. Tribes crossing
and recrossing the same gulley, desperately trying to draw a line
against extinction. It is with this herd of ghosts that I travel, alone.
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After some hours, I pause. I have been aware for some time
of tiny movements in the edges of my vision, fish-like punctuations breaking the solid wave of stone on either side, catching
the light in dim flashes for less than a blink. Every time I stop,
the phenomenon ceases. When I continue, the glinting peripheral
shoal follows me. There is wonder at first, but it has now turned to
unease, and I fear sentience or hallucination. Neither is wanted at
this time: I seek only loneliness and distance, not wanting association or introspection, it being necessary to seek one dimension
to understand with clarity. Complexity has crippled me before,
and the healing from it took too many years. I will not go there
again and share my being with all those others who would claim
and squabble over my loyalty. I need only to breathe and walk, but
at this time of night, in this albino artery, I hear fear tracking me.
The bow comes to my hand, wand-like and unstrung. She
gives off musk. I become calm and weightless, ready for the
attack. Nothing happens. I stand, as still as a post. After a time,
I tilt my head slightly to see if anything moves. At first nothing,
then a flicker, a single, tiny glimmer. I focus on this sprite and
move towards it in the manner of a cat stalking a sound. It is not
in the air, but in the walls of white stone. I can see it embedded
in its cretaceous library. Starlight has ignited it, and a resonance
of dim brilliance quivers about its edge. It is a fossilised sharks
tooth, a small, smooth dagger encrusted into the stone, its edges
bitterly serrated and gnawing against the distant celestial light.
These teeth were once greatly prized and, as I recall, had
offered a small industry to the local inhabitants, who dug them
out and exported them to political cities, where they were
mounted in silver and hung in a cluster on a miniature baroque
tree. It was called a credenza, a name that became synonymous
with the side table that once held it. The Borgazis and the Medici
owned rich and sumptuous versions. When a guest was given
wine, he or she was shown to the tree and allowed to freely pick
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a tooth and place it in the chalice, its delicate chain hooked over
the rim. If the tooth turned black, the wine was poisoned; if
it stayed unstained, the credence of the wine and the host was
proven and business and friendship could commence.
I stand in the black night, musing on distant tables and forgotten aggressions, in a stone river of teeth, some of which I can
use; their compact hardness and perfect jagged edges would
make excellent arrowheads. In the approaching morning, I will
dig them out and clean them, find straight wood for the shafts
and hunt swallows; their wings will be my fletching. The wings
are only perfect when cut from the bird alive, so I will have to
make nets to trap their speed.
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