Green Eyes

Chapter 17

‘Musta got caught up in the mangrove,’ said the Baron when Papa Salvatino’s body could not be found. ‘Or else,’ he said, and grinned, not in the least distressed, ‘there’s a gator driftin’ out there somewhere’s with a mean case of the shits.’

Otille, however, was not amused. Screams and the noise of breakage were reported from the attic, and the ‘friends’ slunk about the downstairs, fleeing to the cabins at the slightest suspicion of her presence. But to Jocundra’s knowledge, Otille left her rooms only once between the day of Papa’s death and the completion of the veve - a period of more than two weeks - and then it was to oversee the punishment of Clea, Simpkins and Downey. She had them tied to the porch railing of the main house and beaten with bamboo canes, the beating applied by a fat, swarthy man apparently imported especially for the occasion. Clea screeched and sobbed, Downey whimpered and begged, Simpkins - to Jocundra’s surprise - howled like a dog with every stroke. The ‘friends’ huddled together in front of the porch, sullen and fearful, and in the manner of an evil plantation queen, Otille stood cold and aloof in the doorway. Her black mourning dress blended so absolutely with the boards that it seemed to Jocundra her porcelain face and hands were disembodied, inset, the antithesis of the ebony faces and limbs inside.

Without Otille’s demands to contend with, Donnell relaxed and became less withdrawn, though he still would not talk about his thoughts or his days among the pets. But for a time it was as if they were back at Mr Brisbeau’s. They walked and made love and explored the crannies of the house. They were free of pets and ‘friends,’ of everyone except the Baron, who continued to exercise the role of bodyguard. Yet as the veve’s date of completion neared, Donnell grew edgy. ‘What if it doesn’t work?’ he would ask, and she would answer, ‘You believe it’s going to, don’t you?’ He would nod, appear confident for a while, but the question always popped up again. ‘If it doesn’t,’ she suggested, ‘there’s always the project.’ He said he would have to think about that.

Jocundra had visited the construction site often, but because of the swarm of workmen and the veve’s unfinished state, she had gained no real impression of how it would look. And so, on the night Donnell first used it, when she climbed to the top of the last conical hill and gazed down into the depression where it lay, she was taken aback by its appearance. Three tons of copper, seventy feet long and fifty wide, composed of welded strips and mounted on supports a couple of feet high driven into the ground. Surrounding the clearing was a jungly thickness of oaks, many of them dead and vine-shrouded, towered over by a lone cypress; the spot from which Jocundra, Otille and the Baron were to observe was arched over by two epiphyte-laden branches. Floodlights were hung in the trees, angled downward and rippling up the copper surfaces. Bats, dazed by the lights, skimmed low above the veve and thumped into the oak trunks. The ground below it had been bulldozed into a circle of black dirt, and this made the great design seem like a glowing brand poised to sear the earth.

‘I certainly hope this works,’ said Otille without emotion. She still wore her mourning dress for Papa, and Jocundra believed her grief was real. A cold, ritual grief, but deeply felt all the same. Beside her, the Baron settled a video camera on his shoulder.

‘Good luck,’ Jocundra whispered, hugging Donnell.

‘The worse that can happen is that I fall off,’ he said. He tried a smile but it didn’t fit. Then he gave her another hug and went down the hill. He looked insignificant against the mass of copper, his jeans and shirt ridiculously modern in conjunction with its archaic pattern. She had the feeling it might suddenly uncoil, revealing itself to have been a copper serpent all along, and swallow him up, and she crossed her fingers behind her back, wishing she could come closer to a prayer than a child’s charm, that like her mother she could find comfort at the feet of an idol, or that like Donnell she could shape her faith into the twists and turns of the veve.

If even he could.

What if it didn’t work?

Shortly after he began walking atop the veve, a wind kicked up. Jocundra had been expecting it, but Otille became flustered. She darted her head from side to side as if hearing dread whispers, and she picked at the folds of her skirt. She started to say something to Jocundra, but instead took a deep breath and thinned her mouth. The Baron glued his eye to the viewfinder, unmindful of the wind, which now was circling the perimeter of the clearing, moving sluggishly, its passage evident by the lifting of branches and shivering leaves. Each circuit lasted for a slow count of ten. Strands of Otille’s hair plastered against her cheek like whip marks every time the wind blew past; she stared open-mouthed, and Jocundra gave her a reassuring smile, then wondered how she could be so reassuring. A burst of static charges crackled along her neck, the hair of her forearms prickled. The air was chilling rapidly, and despite the humidity, her skin felt parched. With every few revolutions, the force of the wind increased appreciably. Hanks of gray moss were ripped from the branches, leaf storms whirled up, and the wind began to pour over the hilltop, its howl oscillating faster and faster, around and around.

Yet through all this Donnell’s clothes hung limp, and he had done nothing more than walk.

The Baron staggered and nearly fell, overbalanced by the camera. Otille helped to brace him, but only for a moment. Then she screamed as the top branch of the largest oak tore loose and sailed away. Jocundra scrambled down into the lee of the hill and peered out over the edge. Donnell was standing on a central junction of the veve, swaying; his hands waved above his head in languid gestures, the gestures of a pagan priest entreating his god. And she remembered the films she had seen of possession rites, the celebrants’ feet rooted, their arms waving in these same ecstatic gestures. Otille came crawling down, clutching at her. But Jocundra drew back in fright. Otille’s hair was rising into Medusa coils over her head, twisting and snapping. Out of reflex, Jocundra touched her own hair. It eeled away from her fingers. Her blouse belled, as did her jeans, repelled by the fire accumulating on her skin. Otille pointed toward the veve, her face pleading some question. Jocundra followed her point, and this time, as her own scream shattered in her throat unheard, she had no thought of offering reassurance.

Movement, Donnell soon discovered, was the key to operating the veve. The magnetic fields of the copper were blurs of opaque white light, clouds of it, hovering, vanishing, fading into view; they drifted away from his hands whenever he tried to manipulate them. He walked along, trying this and that to no avail, and then realized he had been walking the course directed by the movements of the bacteria. He could feel them more discreetly than ever, more strongly, a warm trickling inside his head. He continued to walk, following a trail inward, and from every junction of the veve but one - and that one, he saw, was to be his destination - a strand of white fire rose, forming into a webwork building up and up around him, a towerlike structure. High above, the milky spectre of the geomagnetic field winked in and out across the sky, and he understood that the complicated flows of the web and his own path were in harmony with it, adapting to its changes. His customary weakness ebbed and he walked faster, causing the structure of the fields to rise higher and become more complex. His new strength acted as a drug, and his thoughts were subsumed by the play of his muscles, the rush of his blood. The fields were singing to him, a reedy insect chorus filling his ears, and he came to know his path as a shaman’s dance, an emblem etched upon the floor of the universe by an act both of will and physicality. Then the movements of the bacteria ceased, and he stopped dead center of his predestined junction.

A tower of incendiary wires, intricate as lace, rose around him into the sky, and the geomagnetic field no longer flickered, but was a white road curving from horizon to horizon. It’s cold gleam seemed to embody a unity of object and event, being both a destination and a road. Almost tearful, knowing himself unable to reach it yet reaching anyway, like a child trying to touch a star, he lifted his hands to it. The lowest strands of the tower shot toward him and grafted to his fingertips, and at the same time, the geomagnetic field bulged downward, its center fraying into strands that joined with the tower. A flash whitened the sky, and as the light decayed from the outer edges of the flash, it resolved into a latticework of fire, all of its strands flowing inward and pouring down into his outstretched hands.

He had not known his body could encompass such a feeling of power. It was like existing on the boiling edges of a cloud - a place where the borders between the material and immaterial were ceaselessly being redefined - and drawing energy from the transformations. A rapturous strength burned in him. For a moment his eyes were dazzled with whiteness, his consciousness drawn into an involvement of which love and joy, all human emotion, were but fractionated ideals.

Groggy, he blinked and shook his head and looked around.

He might have been standing inside a knot tied in a black rope, gazing up through the interstices at sections of a pale purple ceiling. But directly above him, perhaps a hundred feet distant and visible between coils of black wood, was a castle turret. He recognized it as the turret of Ghazes, the disciplinary post of the Yoalo high in the brambly growth of Moselantja. Characters testifying to the public desire for self-abnegation were carved in the teeth of the battlements.

The apparition of the turret was so unexpected, looming over him like a wave about to crash, that he flung out his right hand in a futile attempt to ward it off. His hand was a negative, featureless black; his fingers shimmered, and gouts of iridescent fire lanced from their tips, merging to a single beam and splashing against the turret, halating it with a rainbow brilliance. He tried to jerk back his hand, but it was locked in position; he wrenched and threw himself in all directions until he sagged from exhaustion, literally hanging by his arm. A few yards away, he made out a fanged door opening into one of the stems, the wall inside furred with lichen that shed a fishbelly phosphorescence. The air stank of ozone, and everything was motionless, soundless.

But then he heard a sound.

At first he thought it was speech of a sort, for it had the rhythm and sonority of words pronounced by a leathery tongue. He stared back over his shoulder and saw something bob up in silhouette against the sky, sink behind a stem and rise again. Something awkward and long-winged, with the bulbous body of a fly. Another creature appeared, another, and another yet. There were at least a dozen, all flapping lazily toward him through the maze of stems.

Once more, this time choking with fear, he tried to wrench himself free. Fire still lanced from his fingertips. The radiance about the turret was pulsing, and the turret itself rippled. Then, berating himself for stupidity, he remembered how to disengage the weapon capacity of the suit. He formed his hand into a claw so that the five beams splashed into each other and slowly brought his fingers together until they met.

The foremost of the beasts cleared the stem beyond his, its face a horror of white-rimmed eyes, an ape’s flat nose, needle teeth, tendrils flapping from its lips. It beat its wings, gaining altitude for a dive, and he caught a whiff of fetor and a glimpse of its scabbed underbelly. He crouched down, but a wing buffeted the side of his head and sent him reeling to the edge of the stem. As he teetered, he saw below a puzzle of purple gleam and shadow and interlocking stems. Falling, he clawed at the air and felt a tension on his fingertips.

His fall should have been endless. He should have caromed off the infinity of stems beneath, being battered into shapelessness and blood. But he fell only a couple of feet through a burst of white glory and landed on his side. Dazed, he rolled onto his back. Overhead, slung like a sagging hammock, the crescent moon held sway amid the pinprick stars of a Louisiana night.

The wind shredded Jocundra’s scream. From Donnell’s fingers a stream of numinous energy, the ghost of a beam, lanced towards the top of the cypress tree. He was struggling as if his arm were gripped by a transparent vise, throwing himself backward, panicked. She started crawling down the hill, but the wind knocked her flat. Crumpled wrappers, tin cans, bottles and twigs skittered along the ground, all shining with coronas; the air was full of stinging grit. Something smacked against her cheek, clung for a second with sticky claws, dropped down into her blouse and walked across her breasts. She rolled over, beating at her chest until a half-crushed cricket fell out and flipped away in the wind, leaving a wet smear on her belly. She looked up just as Donnell toppled off the veve, and as the cypress top, surrounded by a halo of ghostly radiance, exploded.

At least it began as an explosion.

There was a blast, flames rayed out, a fireball grew. But when it had reached the limit of its expansion, the fireball did not shrink or dissipate into smoke. Instead, it held its shape; then the flames paled and condensed into a cloud of ruby sparks, which themselves settled into the outlines of a mechanism, one of enigmatic complexity. A piece of jeweled clockwork that folded in upon itself and receded into a previously unnoticed distance: a dark tunnel collapsed through the night sky. The last of the wind went with it, giving out a keening cry that set Jocundra’s teeth on edge.

By the time she had crossed the veve to the spot where Donnell had fallen, he was sitting up and staring at the blasted cypress. Blood streamed from his nostrils. She jumped down beside him, held his head, and pinched his nostrils to staunch the flow. His eyes showed hardly any green. Thinking it might just be the brightness of the floodlights, she shaded them with her hand. A few flickers, vivid, but only a few.

‘I feel good,’ he said. ‘My heart’s not as erratic.’ He gazed up at her. ‘My eyes?’

She nodded, unable to speak, her own eyes brimming. She put her arms around him and rested her head on the back of his neck.

‘You’re smothering me,’ he mumbled, but held tightly to her waist.

A scream rang out from the hilltop. Jocundra looked back to see Otille struggling in the Baron’s grasp. She swung her head back and forth, kicked his legs with her heels. He picked her up and started toward the house; but Otille managed a final scream, and this time it was intelligible. One word.

‘Ogoun!’

Donnell stared at the hilltop long after they had gone, and though his features were calm, Jocundra thought she could detect a mixture of hatred and longing in his expression. ‘What’s wrong with her?’ he asked.

‘The wind frightened her,’ she said. ‘And the tree. What did happen with the tree?’

‘I don’t know,’ he muttered. ‘An accident. Maybe you can figure it but.’ He turned to the cypress. A thin smoke curled from the ruin of its trunk, misting the stars. His voice became resonant, his tone sarcastic, as he said, ‘God knows what all this is going to do to Otille.’

Within two days Donnell’s eyes were as brilliant as ever, and he went back upon the veve, thereafter returning to it at least once a day. There was no danger of him overdoing it. While the treatment did serve to trim the size of the colony, it also appeared to have stimulated their rate of reproduction, and Jocundra doubted he could last much more than two weeks of abstinence. The Baron continued to film Donnell - he had dug a niche into the side of the hill for shelter against the wind - but Otille remained barricaded in her apartments. One experience with Donnell’s newly augmented powers had apparently been enough. When asked about her, the Baron would grunt and make offhanded comments. ‘Otille just need to sit and watch her forest grow,’ he said once. ‘She gon’ get it back together.’ But he didn’t seem to be convinced.

Terrified by the wind, which was shredding the jungles of Maravillosa as Donnell’s power increased, growing in force and scope, some of the ‘friends’ left the estate, and those who stayed hid out in the cabins. With the exception of Captain Tomorrow. He was delighted by the wind and had to be shooed away from the veve. Whenever he encountered Jocundra, he spoke to her in a scholarly fashion, informing her once that the physics of fantasy was ‘on the verge of actuation,’ and showing her his design for a thought-powered laser, inspired, he said, by Donnell’s ‘wind trip.’

As for Jocundra, since the Baron was present to watch over Donnell, she preferred to wait in their room during the treatments. Sometimes she worked on the principles underlying the operation of the veve, but she was not often successful in this. The wind unnerved her. Despite her rational understanding of it, charged ions, vacating air masses, she had the feeling it could carry the paper bearing her explanations off to a realm where explanations were no longer relevant. Mostly she thought about Donnell. He was hiding something from her, she believed, and she did not think it could be anything positive. His attitude toward the veve puzzled her. He had not been at all distressed to learn of his addiction to it; in fact, he had appeared relieved to learn he could use it frequently.

One evening, eleven days after the completion of the veve, while sitting at their window, listening to branches snap, leaves scuttering across the side of the house, Jocundra noticed the corner of a notebook sticking out from beneath their mattress. On first leafing through it, she thought it to be notes for a new story because of the odd nomenclature of towns and people, its references to the purple sun and the Yoalo. But then she realized it was a journal of Donnell’s walks upon the veve. On the inside foreleaf was a sketch of the veve, every junction numbered, and a list of what seemed to be the ranks of the Yoalo. Inductee, Initiate, Medium, Sub-aspect, Aspect, High Aspect. She had a twinge of foreboding, and as she settled back to read the first entry, she tried to tell herself it was only background for a story written in diary form.

Sept. 8. Ended up on Junction 14. The sun edging down, a long pale bulge like a continental margin lifting from the horizon, fringed by a corona of vivid purple. Stars ablaze. No moon. Broken, barren hills to my left, and I thought that Moselantja was somewhere behind them. I was atop a cliff which fell away into a forested valley. Massed empurpled trees locked in shadow, the crooked track of a river cutting through, and two-thirds of the way across the valley, at a forking of the river, was a village laid out in a peculiar pattern, one I could not quite discern because of my angle. I tried to shift my field focus forward; it was harder than usual. Instead of snapping into place, it was as if I were pushing through some barrier heavier than distance. Finally I managed a perspective at eye level of the street. A door opened in one of the houses; a man poked his head out, gave a squeal of fright and ducked inside. How the hell had he seen me? I looked down and saw that I was sheathed in black. Shimmering, unfeatured black. Energy suit. I had been on a clifftop, and now was planted smack in the midst of Rumelya (the name springing unbidden to mind). Memories flooded me, among them information about the suit’s capacity for nearly instantaneous travel along line-of-sight distances. The river - the Quinza - was not safe for swimming, though I couldn’t recall why, and the name of the forest was the Mothemelle.

Bits of litter, black leaves, were drifting across the dusty street. All the buildings were of weathered black wood, and most were of two stories, the topmost overhanging the lower and supported by carven posts. Every inch of the buildings was carved: lintels evolving into gargoyle’s heads, roof peaks into ornate finials. The doorframes flowed with tiny faces intertwined with vines, and stranger faces yet - half flower, half beast -emerged from the walls. The similarity between these embellishments and those of Maravillosa was inescapable. Light issued from shutters pierced by scatters of star-shaped holes so that the appearance was of panels of night sky studded with orange stars. Though many of the details were not of my original invention - the names, for instance - it was the village of my story, complete down to the sign above the inn, an odd image I now recognized for a petro painting. The evilly tenanted forest looming over the roofs; the tense, secretive atmosphere; the cracked shells and litter blowing on the streets; it was all the same. Voices were raised inside the inn, and I had a strong intuition that some important event was soon to occur there.

As the sun’s corona streamed higher above the forest, striking violet glints from the eddies in the river, I noticed an ideograph laid out in black dust centering the crossroads just ahead. The fitful breeze steadied, formed into a whirlwind over the ideograph, and dissipated it into a particulate haze. I had a memory of an old man wearing a dun-colored robe, bending over an orange glow, talking to me. His voice was hoarse and feeble, the creaking of a gate modulated into speech. ‘The stars are men’s doubles,’ he said. ‘The wind is a soul without a body.’

Shortly after this, I became afraid I would not be able to leave Rumelya. I had - hadn’t I? - moved from my position on the veve. I walked back and forth, left and right, attempting to fall off as I had the first time. To no avail. Then, just as had happened beneath the turret of Ghazes, I recalled the necessary function of my suit, that it acted to orient me within the geomagnetic field. I reached up and felt the connections in the air. Again, the mystic experience of transition. It was losing its impact, and I remember thinking during transit that such depersonalized ecstasy might grow boring. I found myself back on Junction 14 waving my arms like a man drowning.

By the time she had finished half the entries, Jocundra’s foreboding had matured into disastrous knowledge. Either the immense electromagnetic forces were unhinging him, fueling fantasies with which to form a surrogate past, or - and this she could not fully disbelieve - he was actually traveling somewhere. No matter what the case, and though she was certain he had not told her to protect her from worry, his secrecy was a barrier between them.

The last entry in the journal detailed his arrival in a great hall whose walls were ranked to the ceiling with mirrors. Translucent creatures - ‘crystalline imperfections in the air, as quick as hummingbirds’ - flew between the mirrors. Images appeared in their wake. One mirror held a view of golden-edged green scales shifting back and forth, as though the coils of an enormous snake enwrapped the hall; a second showed a gem-studded game board, its counters swathed in cobweb; a third depicted a black-suited Yoalo standing atop one of the turrets of Moselantja, spinning around and around, his arms raised overhead, becoming more and more transparent until only a wind whirled in his place, bearing up dust from the turret floor. Each successive mirror image caused him to recall bits and details: the movements of military forces, names, a sequence of letters and numbers which reminded Jocundra of astronomical coordinates. A final mirror offered him the sight of a woman leaning forward, herself looking into a mirror, her face obscured by a fall of dark hair; she then bent her head and lifted her hair up behind her.

I was overcome with longing. The shade of her hair was identical to Jocundra’s, dark brown wound through with gold, and her movements were Jocundra’s, the way she held her back perfectly straight while bending. I envisioned the old man once again, his shoulders hunched, holding out something to me: an ivory sphere, one of those conceits carved and hollowed with smaller spheres within. It was cradled in his palm like a pearl in the meat of an oyster. ‘If you lose something,’ he said, ‘you will find it here. And if it truly is yours, it will return to you.’ I knew then that this woman, whether Jocundra by name or some other, was bound to me through worlds and time, and that all I had seen within the mirrors were the elements of days to come.

Jocundra set down the journal and went to the window. He was, it appeared, thinking about losing her, and now this same thought infected her. Though it was something she had once taken for granted, the prospect had become terrifying, impossible to accept. The house shuddered.

Branches clawed and scuttered against the outer walls. She wished she had a word with which to shout down the wind, an incantation to still it, because it seemed to her a howling prophecy of loss. But growing stronger, it sang in the eaves and shaped groaning, inarticulate words from the open windows, mournful sounds, like sad monsters waking with questions on their minds.

The pale sun, its corona shrunk in a cyanotic rim, showed an arc above the forest of Mothemelle. Donnell stood with an ear pressed in the window of the inn at Rumelya, trying to assure himself that there were no patrons inside. At last, hearing only a tuneless singing, the clatter of crockery, he pushed in the door. A dumpy serving girl threw up an armload of dishes and ran through a curtained doorway, leaving him alone in the common room. Long gray benches and boards; whitewashed walls, one having a curtained niche; floors of packed sand littered with scraps of gristle, bones, and a striped lizard curled around a table leg; a high ceiling crossed by heavy beams and hung with ladles and pans of black iron. He took a seat near the door and waited. The most peculiar thing about the room was the orange light. It had no apparent source; the room was simply filled with it.

The innkeeper proved to be a chubby young man, his eyes set close together above a squidgy nose and a cherubic mouth. He wore a tunic of coarse cloth, an apron, and carried a tray holding a chipped ceramic mug. ‘Brew?’ he asked hopefully, his lips aquiver. Donnell nodded, and the innkeeper set down the mug, jerking back his hand. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘uh, Lord, uh…’ Donnell looked up at him, and he stiffened.

Donnell indicated the curtained niche. ‘I will watch from there tonight,’ he said, toying with the handle of his mug. Black sparks from his fingers adhered to the ceramic, jittering a second and vanishing.

‘Certainly, Lord.’ The innkeeper clasped his hands in an attitude of obeisance. ‘But, Lord, are you aware that the Aspect comes here of an evening?’

‘Yes,’ said Donnell, not aware in the least. He picked up the mug - vile-smelling stuff, fermented tree bark -and carried it to the table behind the curtain. ‘Where does he usually sit?’ he asked. The innkeeper pointed at a spot by the rear wall, and Donnell adjusted the curtain to provide an uninhibited view. He felt no need to urge the innkeeper to be close mouthed about his presence. The man’s fear was excessive.

Over the next half hour, seven men filtered into the inn. They might have been cousins, all dark-haired and heavy-boned, ranging from youth to middle age, and all were dressed in fish-hide leggings and loose shirts. Their mood was weary and their talk unenthused, mostly concerned with certain tricky currents which had arisen of late in the river, due, one said, to ‘meddling.’ Their language, though Donnell had assumed it to be English, was harsh, many words having the sound of a horse munching an apple, and he realized he had been conversing in it quite handily.

Another half hour passed, two men left, three more arrived, and then a wind blew open the door, swirling the sand. A man wearing the black of the Yoalo entered and threw himself down on a bench by the far wall. His face made Donnell wish for a mirror. It was a bestial mask occupying an oval inset in the black stuff. Satiny-looking vermillion cheeks, an ivory forehead figured by stylized lines of rage, golden eyes with slit pupils, a fanged mouth which moved when he spoke. Every one of its features reacted to the musculature beneath. He proceeded to swallow mug after mug of the brew, tossing them off in silence, signaling the serving girl for more. Once he grabbed for her, and as she skipped away, he laughed. ‘Trying to tame these country sluts is like trying to cage the wind,’ he said loudly. His voice was vibrationless and of startling resonance. All the men laughed and went back to their conversations. Though he was Yoalo, they accorded him only a token respect, and Donnell thought that if he was Aspect here, he would require of them a more rigorous courtesy.

The man drank heavily for a while, apparently depressed; he stared at his feet, scuffing the sand. At length, he hailed the innkeeper and invited him to sit. ‘Anyone I ought to know about?’ he asked.

‘Well,’ said the innkeeper, studiously avoiding looking at the niche, ‘there was a trickster by last week.’ And then, becoming enthusiastic, he added, ‘He sent red flames shooting out of the wine bottles.’

‘Name?’ inquired the Yoalo, then waved off the question. ‘Never mind. Probably one of those vagabonds who was camped in the southern crevices. Must have stolen a scrap of power with which to impress the bumpkins.’

The innkeeper looked hurt and bumpkinish. ‘I wish I could see Moselantja.’

‘Easy enough,’ said the Yoalo. ‘Volunteer.’ He laughed a sneering laugh, and began a boastful account of the wonders of Moselantja, of his various campaigns, of the speeds and distances attained by his ‘ourdha,’ a word Donnell translated as ‘windy soul.’

All at once the door banged open, and a ragged old man, his clothes patched and holed, baskets of various sizes slung about his shoulder, came into the inn. ‘Snakes!’ he cried. ‘Plump full of poison!’ He plucked a large banded snake from one of the baskets and held it up for all to see. The village men gave forth with nods and murmurs of admiration, but claimed to be already well supplied with snakes. The old man put on a doleful face, wrinkling so deeply he had the look of a woodcarving. Then he spied the Yoalo and did a little caper toward him, flaunting the snake and whistling.

Furious at this interruption, the Yoalo jumped up and seized the snake. Blood spurted out the sides of his fist, and the severed halves of the snake dropped to the sand, writhing. He aimed a backhand at the old man, who dived onto the floor, and weaved toward the door and into the street. With the exception of the snake-seller -he was bemoaning the loss of his prize catch - the village men remained calm, shrugging, joking about the incident. But upon seeing Donnell emerge from the niche, they knocked over their benches and scrambled to the opposite end of the room.

‘Lord!’ cried the snake-seller, crawling into Donnell’s path. ‘My eldest was a tenth-level recruit of your cadre. Hear me!’

‘Tenth-level,’ said Donnell. ‘Then he died upon the turret.’

‘But well, Lord. He gave no outcry.

‘I will listen.’ Donnell folded his arms, amused by his easy acceptance of rank, but quite prepared to exercise its duties.

‘This,’ said the old man, picking up the snake’s head, ‘this is nothing to the abuses we of Rumelya suffer. But to me this is much.’

He began a lengthy tale of its capture, half a day spent among the rocks, tempting it with a gobbet of meat on a forked stick, breaking its teeth with a twist when it struck. He testified to its worth and listed the Yoalo’s other abuses. Rape, robbery, assault. His complaint was not the nature of the offences - they were his right - but that they were performed with such vicious erraticism they had the character of a madman’s excesses rather than the strictures of a conqueror. He begged for surcease.

The old man’s eyes watered; his skin was moley; his forearms were pitted with scarred puckers, places where he had been bitten and had cut away the flesh to prevent the spread of the poison. These imperfections grated on Donnell, but he did not let them affect his judgement.

‘It will be considered,’ he said. ‘But consider this. I have witnessed great disrespect in Rumelya, and perhaps it is due. But had you honored the Aspect properly, he might well have served you better. Should another take his place, your laxity will be counted a factor in determining the measures of governance.’ As he left, he heard the village men haranguing the snake-seller for his lack of caution.

The Yoalo’s trail - rayed depressions in the sand -turned left, left again, and Donnell saw the river at the end of the street. Above the treeline on the far bank, the sun’s corona raised purple auroras into the night sky, and the stars were so large and bright they appeared to be dancing about into new alignments. The street gave out onto a grassy bank where several long canoes were overturned, and sitting upon one of these was the shadowy figure of the Yoalo. In order to get close, Donnell shifted his visual field forward as he had done on his first visit to the village. This time he noticed a shimmering, inconstant feeling in all his flesh as the suit bore him to the rear of a shed some twenty feet along the bank from the Yoalo’s canoe. The man was rocking back and forth, chuckling, probably delighting in the incident of the snake. He touched his forehead, the mask wavered and disappeared. But before Donnell could see his face, the man flattened onto his stomach, leaned out above the river and splashed water over himself. Something ki-yied deep in the forest, a fierce and solitary cry that might have come from a metal throat. Sputtering, the Yoalo propped himself up on an elbow, staring off in Donnell’s direction.

Except for the fact that his eyes were dark, betraying no hint of green, he was the spitting image of Jack Richmond. Skull-featured, thin to the point of emaciation.

All the man’s behavior, his fits of violence and depression, his harassment of the serving girl, his obsession with speed, clicked into focus for Donnell. He was about to call to him when the man came up into a crouch, his right hand extended, alerted by something. With his left hand, he reached inside his suit and pulled forth a construction of - it seemed - wires and diamonds, and flicked it open. Its unfolding was a slow organic process, a constant evolution into new alignments like the agitated stars overhead. Drunkenly, the Yoalo stared at it, swaying, then fell on his back; he rolled over and up, and iridescent beams of fire spat from his hand toward a dark object on the bank. It burst into flames, showing itself to be a stack of bales, one of several such stacks dotting the shore.

The Yoalo shook his head at his own foolishness, chuckled, and folded the bright contraption; it shrank to a sparkle of sapphire light as he pocketed it, as if he had collapsed a small galaxy into a single sun. He touched his forehead, and the mask reappeared. Then he went staggering down the bank, his hand extended, firing at the stacked bales, setting every one of them ablaze. With each burst, he shouted, ‘Ogoun!’ and laughed. His laughter grew in volume, becoming ear-splitting, obviously amplified; it ricocheted off the waterfront buildings. The fires sent dervish shadows leaping up the street, casting gleams over the carved faces on the walls, and illuminated the ebony flow of the river and the thick vegetation of the far bank.

Amid a welter of spear-shaped leaves, Donnell saw the movements of low-slung bodies. But, he thought, the truly dangerous animal wore a suit of negative black and roamed the streets of Rumelya without challenge. A vandal, a coarse outlaw. Yet though he despised the man’s abuse of privilege, he was captivated by the drama of the scene. This maniacal warrior with the face of a beast howling his laughter, taunting the lie-abed burghers and fishermen; the rush of dark water; the auroral veils billowing over the deep forest; the slinking animals. It was like a nerve of existence laid bare, a glistening circuit with the impact of a one line poem. He filed the scene away, thinking he might compose the poem during his next period of meditation. Half in salute, honoring the vitality of what he had witnessed, half a warning, he sent a burst of his own fire to scorch the earth at the Yoalo’s feet. And then he lifted his hands to engage the fields and returned to Maravillosa.

The sky was graying, coming up dawn. One of the bushes near the veve was a blackened skeleton, wisps of smoke curling from the twig ends. He sat down cross-legged on, the ground. Within the fields, he thought, he was a far different person than the one who now doubted the validity of the experience. Not that he was capable of real doubt. The whole question was basically uninteresting.

‘Hey, monkey!’ The Baron waved from the hilltop.

The wind must have been bad. An avenue had been gouged through the undergrowth, and he could see a portion of the house between the hills. Gables, the top of his bedroom window. Jocundra would be asleep, her long legs drawn up, her hand trailing across his pillow.

‘Man,’ said the Baron, coming toward him. ‘You got to control this shit!’ He gestured at the battered foliage.

Donnell shrugged. ‘What can I do?’

The Baron sat down on the veve. ‘I don’t know, man,’ he said, sounding discouraged. ‘Maybe the best thing can happen is for it to all blow away.’ He spat. ‘You got another nosebleed, man.’

Donnell wiped his upper lip. Blood smeared and settled into the lines of his palm, seeming to form a character, one which had much in common with a tangle of epiphytic stalks and blooms blown beside the veve: fleshy leaves, violet florets. More circuitry ripped up from beneath the skin of the world. Every object, the old man had said, is but an interpretation of every other object. There is no sure knowledge, only endless process.

‘When you first come here, man,’ said the Baron, ‘I thought you was sleaze like Papa and them other uglies. But I got to admit you unusual.’ He coughed and spat again. ‘Things is gettin’ pretty loose up in the attic. You and me should have a talk sometime ‘bout what’s happenin’ ‘round here.’

‘Yeah,’ said Donnell, suddenly alert to his weariness, to the fact that he was back in the world. ‘Not now, though. I need some sleep.’

But a few days later Otille sent the Baron away on business, and by the time he returned things had gone beyond the talking stage.