GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS EXTRACTS
Waterblack, by Alex Pheby
I.
PRESSED UP AGAINST THE WINDOW on the other side, filling fully half of it, in the corner away from the door, was what seemed to be an enormous mound of clay. The Sparkline Actuary for this building was a snub-nosed ginger cat, untroubled by the water. He trotted over to where the clay was, jumped up onto the windowsill and scratched his tally into the glass: four long lines, and under that the sign Nathan now knew represented him. Then the cat turned and mewled silently into the water, its toothless mouth opening and closing once, its cloudy eyes closing and opening once, blinking once. It waited.
Glass is a fragile thing, and the mass behind this sheet, when it moved, made it tremble, threatening to send cracks across its surface where the Actuary had made his tally marks. A living cat might have been disturbed by this prospect, that sort of creature being easily startled. It might have jumped down and gone off to a safe distance, but this one didn’t care. Perhaps dead cats have no need for startling. Perhaps they
have learned to suppress it.
Nathan went slowly over to where the scratches were, drifting through the water like seaweed in a current. Behind the glass the clay was marked. He lifted his hand and looked at his palm – the marks on the clay were like the lines a fortune teller reads in the practice of chiromancy, lines that speak of longevity and love. Was it a huge, grey hand pressed against the glass? Did the room extend off invisibly to a size suitable to contain a giant, prone? Did he lie in that room, one hand stretching out?
But Nathan had never killed a giant. There was no account to which this dead cat was holding him that would have ‘Giant’ inscribed in the ledger.
It may be that Sparkline Actuaries can understand when their clients are confused, or that might be something a dead cat naturally knows, but this one went from where it had sat itself along the sill to where the clay no longer pressed, and it looked through the glass in the direction it wanted Nathan to look. When Nathan did not move immediately, the cat looked again, turning its patchily furred head, opening up a wound large enough to show the bones beneath, to show a recess in which a small crab was present, nibbling at the edge of the flesh with its palps.
Nathan swallowed, but came where he was asked to come and looked where the cat turned again to look.
The room, past the mass of clay, did indeed extend off into the distance, but unlike some unfamiliar interior suitable for a giant, this was a place Nathan recognised. Before his death, before the immaterial realm, before the Mistress, before whatever this existence now was, he had gone with Gam and Prissy to the Zoological Gardens of Mordew. There they had seen the peacocks and the tigers, had fed the alifonjers with buns. After they burgled the Spire, they had returned here with the dogs. Nathan had returned here alone, one night, to punish Prissy’s faithlessness.
That was how he recognised this place, and because he had done something terrible here, he did not question how it was that the Zoo could fit into a room, nor why he couldn’t see its edges and walls – these are questions that only occur to someone with a clearer conscience. He put his hand against the glass: it was vibrating. Though a person doesn’t realise it above the water, vibrations are the things that make sounds, and though the ear is the organ proper to understanding whatever meaning these vibrations contain, the parts of the body most sensitive to touch can understand them too, after a fashion. Through the window, Nathan’s fingertips could feel the sound of breathing, touch the anxious and insistent panting of animals, so that he knew when he turned from the angle the cat had shown him that the mass that pressed against the glass was neither clay, nor the palm of a giant, but was the form of the last family of alifonjers, wedged fearfully into the corner the window and one wall of their enclosure made.
There they were, the calves, the dam, the bull, knees bent, each behind the other, the bull male at the front. He hadn’t seen them from this angle when he had come down from the Master’s Manse. He had come from above. He hadn’t heard them breathing like this – frightened, defiant, confused, each animal communicating their emotion to the others. In his ears on that day had been the insistent hissing of his anger, on his fingertips the Spark Itch, wanting to be scratched. Then his fury had been all-encompassing, catalysed by the talking book, provocations of justification and power silencing any doubt in him that might have made him think.
He hadn’t seen them, then, with the coldness of mind he had now, chilled by the great volume of dousing water that surrounded him on all sides.
Behind the window, up in a sky that was impossibly contained by the room, there was a bright blue star. The alifonjers were looking at it, their brown eyes liquid and dilating, the bull’s trunk pushing his wife back into the corner, shielding her with his bulk, barring the oncoming strangeness with the fence posts of his tusks. The dam shielded the calves, her trunk blindfolding them as best she could, as if not seeing was a
form of protection, except the calves squirmed and wriggled in their fear, and in the smallest animal’s eyes, still larger than Nathan’s, Nathan could see himself coming down from the sky, growing in that terrified pupil, briefly contained entirely in it, then exceeding its boundaries, bleaching the iris with scouring blue light, then the skin of its face, then the grey clay of the three of them, discolouring them, until he stood in the
enclosure with them.
Through his fingertips, pressed onto the window, five on each hand – two incomplete spiders, tense and quivering – the sound of them screaming started: the dam and the calves. The bull, to his credit, advanced to meet Nathan in spite of his fear. His tusks were the thickness of a man’s waist, curved as scimitars, cream, mud-tipped from digging at the earth for roots.
He faced the Nathan who walked towards him, not letting the burning of everything around distract him from his duty. He set his legs, and though he blanched at the light, his eyes shrinking into the folds of his flesh, becoming lost, he did not turn away.
Nathan had not seen this back then, had not cared, but now it tore at his heart. Bravery in the face of appalling power. Bravery in the face of a weakness for violence.
Is it allowable for a murderer to feel like Nathan did as he watched himself through the window? Sympathy of this kind, guilt: should that be allowed for murderers? It is a kind of undeserved redemption, isn’t it, to allow the self – the real self, not some weapon used by others – to feel such emotions? I feel pain for the terrors I have committed, not pleasure. I cannot be all bad.
Murderers, though, have murdered. Part of their punishment for murdering is that they are known as what they are, even to themselves – murderers – and sympathy is inimical to that class of person. By concept, they cannot be allowed to contain contradictory definitions – Nathan had been in the immaterial realm recently enough to know this – so even if Nathan felt this guilt, experienced his own pain as he watched himself inflict pain on others, this was not sufficient for him to be defined by it, in his self.
It was not enough, and would never satisfy an Actuary of Waterblack.
The Nathan behind the window faced the bull alifonjer, white in front of him. There was a blue albino, bleached of colour, its edges blurring into the others behind it. Nathan took the tip of a tusk in each hand, and the creature whimpered.
He had done this. He knew what he would do next. To see and know it was wrong now, was that to imagine that this was sufficient to clear his conscience in even the smallest way? No, since that was not congruent with the way of things. It was counter to the ordinances of the city.
Nathan remembered the scorched reek of burning hair that filled the pen. The dam and her children behind seemed to weep and sob, to draw deep ragged breaths. They made strange wheezing whistles.
With no more effort than a man uses to rip paper, or open curtains, the other Nathan tore the bull alifonjer in two, ripping it down the middle. One half of the skeleton adhered to the left side – the left ribs and left leg bones – and the other bones to the right.
It did not call out; it was already dead. Soon even the bones were gone, burned away.
The creature’s wife was next, with a calf, though Nathan was so hot that he never laid a finger on them; they burned in front of him, contributing to the pile of ashes that her husband had become.
Now before the other self was the smallest alifonjer. He stood not defiant, as his father had been, nor petrified, as his mother was, but unable to make any sense at all of what he saw. He raised his nose in a question mark so clear that both Nathans couldn’t help but read it. The little alifonjer blinked and blinked at Nathan’s light, not seeing, perhaps, the dust that had been made of the others.
At his hip, the Nathan in the drowned street of Waterblack felt something touch him. Reflex drew his eyes down: it was the dead cat, pawing at his waistband.
Nathan pushed it away, slowly, his movements muffled by the water, and turned back to the window. He wanted to reach out for the alifonjer, to take it, to save it as he had required saving, the little one, the youngest, but as he moved to do it, to take the thing in his arms, there was the glass between them.
The cat, the Sparkline Actuary, pawed him again, this time with claws drawn, snagging Nathan’s skin through his sodden clothes.
When Nathan looked again, intending to shoo him off, the cat padded away to where it had marked the tally. The Nathan in the room which this cat supervised stepped back, two or three paces, until he was amongst the charred remains and white ash of the last alifonjer’s family.
They piled at his feet like a snowdrift.
Then, by virtue of some trick of perspective, both the Nathan behind the glass and the Nathan in the water were looking at where the dead cat was. The mouldering thing raised its paw, edged with rot and coming to pieces, and across the four lines already scratched, it made another, crossing the others at a diagonal. Neither of the Nathans knew it, but this mark was a penalty added for cruelty, and though the cat’s eyes were white with cataracts, inexpressive in the way they’d need to be to communicate emotion, it glared at Nathan with disgust.
When the Nathans looked back, the youngest alifonjer was a pile of dust.
*
As if at a click of fingers, the mass of palm-lined grey clay – the backs of the cowering alifonjers – was in the corner of the room again, pressed into the glass, and the Nathan in the room was returned to the sky, a blue and angry star, falling.
The Sparkline Actuary jumped down from the windowsill and trotted across the road to where a colleague from a neighbouring house was waiting. The two butted heads, swept down each other’s sides and then sat together and watched Nathan. Why shouldn’t they? The neighbouring cat – black, crushed down one side, tailless – would mark its tally when the time came, and the ginger one had already done its work. Even dead cats must take their leisure when they can find the opportunity for it.
Nathan wanted to go over to them, to explain himself – his former self. If not to explain, then to apologise. But the people to whom one must make amends in Waterblack are not the Actuaries, who have the freedom of the streets and who do not need anything else. Those requiring recompense are the citizens of that city of the dead, according to its census. Make amends or give revenge – these are the duties of the Master
of Waterblack, owed to those that bear his Sparkmark, and fulfilling them is the manner by which he secures the loyalty of his people.
The Master has the power to make reparations, so that is what he must do.
The falling star was like an approaching firebird – Nathan had seen so many – yet this one was blue. He couldn’t look at the alifonjers, so he stared, unblinking, at himself as he descended from the Manse, walking the distance from the balcony of his playroom through the air, traversing, at the Master’s pleasure, the defensive boundaries that protected the intermediate realms in which he had been living.
Should Nathan have been surprised at his own childlike form? Time had passed since that day, ages perhaps, if time can be measured continuously across the realms. Shouldn’t he have grown, become used to his grown self, now looked back on this remnant of the past with a recognition of its difference from the way he was now? And if insufficient time had passed, then shouldn’t he, from his time in the immaterial realm, have some understanding of the Nathanness of Nathan represented through the run of his existence? Nathan as a baby, Nathan as a child, Nathan adolescent, Nathan adult, this last being the most part of it, since a man matures and remains mature for the largest part of his life unless he dies early?
Here came Nathan, the violent, rage-filled child, murderer of countless thousands, millions even, depending on the counting, and Nathan as he was now recognised himself perfectly as himself, in his physical form at least. When he thought of himself, he could find no other Nathan more advanced than he was at this age.
What did this mean?
Here he came, Nathan, his fists clenched, his teeth gritted, light beaming from the sockets of his eyes as if the whites were the brightest and hottest filaments of a lighthouse lamp, or the sharpest flames of a welding torch, or the very heart of the sun. The rest of him was not much less bright, only the clothes he wore dimmed his essential brightness, and then only a little, like a candle flame seen through wax paper, still bright.
He descended to the ground, and where his feet touched the bare soil that made the enclosure it leapt into flames, despite there being nothing to kindle there. He was so hot and bright that even things least prone to burning burned at his touch, and here he came, his hands reaching, arms outstretched, the air rippling around him.
Nathan’s fingertips on the glass felt his warmth now his attention was drawn to the fact of his heat. He ignored the alifonjers and their breathing – he couldn’t now bear to see them, knowing what was to come – and he felt the roaring of the wind that the other Nathan made of the air, an angry, buffeting hurricane of agitated gas, whipped into a tornado that scorched the glass.
Nathan couldn’t bear to see the alifonjers, or hear them panting, but scarcely more could he bear to see himself, or to feel his heat, and even less to see the bitter fury on his face, to feel his catalysed Spark anger. He went to take his fingers from the glass, but now there was a tackiness to the meeting of the surfaces of his skin and the window that held him in place, and he couldn’t pull away. He went to turn, but suddenly on his shoulder was the Sparkline Actuary, perched like a pirate’s parrot, except where those birds are colourful and raucous, this cat was dull and grim, its white eyes matt. It put its cold paw to Nathan’s cheek and pushed his attention back to the other boy, who was advancing menacingly on the alifonjers, whom Nathan could no longer avoid seeing.
He turned the other way, but here was the black cat, the half-flattened neighbour. With half its mouth it hissed at him, drawing back half its lips over half its teeth and narrowing its only eye.
The burning Nathan faced the bull alifonjer, white in front of him, and there was a blue albino, bleached of colour, its edges blurring into the others behind it. Nathan took the tip of a tusk in each hand, and the creature whimpered.
With no more effort than a man uses to blow a kiss, or to clap his hands, the other Nathan tore the bull alifonjer in two, ripping it down the middle. One half of the skeleton adhered to the left side – the left ribs and left leg bones – the other bones to the right.
The creature’s wife was next, though Nathan was so hot that he never laid a finger on her; she burned in front of him, contributing to the pile of ashes.
A dead cat of the city of Waterblack can direct a boy’s attention to his Sparkline obligation; a Sparkline Actuary has that right under the laws of the city. The edicts that bind the citizens of the City of Death bind its Master equally. The dead are obliged to perform the conditions of their death infinitely, performances require an audience, Nathan was that audience, having brought about the deaths, so the cats wouldn’t let Nathan look away.
The Nathan behind the glass killed everyone and then the littlest of the alifonjers. If Nathan tried to close his eyes, each cat, one to either side, hooked a claw under his left and right eyelid respectively and pulled them open. When he tried to turn his neck, the half-flattened cat, with the magic granted to it, filled the boy’s muscles with the rigor mortis it possessed, paralysing him. Nathan tried to collapse, at the knees, but it is easy to make a boy float underwater at the level required for his face to be directed at his crimes as they are acted out in
front of him through the window of the house, on the street, in the district, in the quarter that contains the dead that he has accrued in the undrowned world.
It is very easy indeed.
Nathan watched, felt, heard, until, as if at a click of the fingers, the scene reset, and there he was at a distance, a falling star, the mass of palm-lined clay against the glass, forced into the right angle that the window and one wall of the alifonjer’s enclosure made. The cats jumped down and retreated to the middle of the road together.
The falling star was like an approaching firebird, the alifonjer calves, dam, and bull, cowered, knees bent, each behind the other, the bull male at the front.
Now, though, Nathan went to the door and opened it. If this was something forbidden, the Sparkline Actuaries did nothing to prevent him – they sat disinterestedly in the middle of the road, licking at themselves.
Behind the door was air, and when Nathan went through into the room the weight of water was suddenly lifted from him, its pressure in his mouth, throat and lungs disappeared in an instant, and he vomited up the water, if vomiting is what a boy does to clear his lungs of fluid.
The brine ran out of his ears as he knelt in the alifonjer’s enclosure, everywhere inside him that was flooded with salt water he cleared by an effort of constricting his muscles. Long ago, it seemed to him, back in the slums, he had watched his father make similar wrackings of himself to bring up a lungworm, and if what Nathan experienced now was anything like that effort then it must have been a terrible thing, since the boy felt as if he would rip himself into pieces, halve himself across the stomach, tear off his head at the neck, cough out all his blood so powerful were the convulsions his body obliged him to endure in order to make itself dry inside.
When it was done, the alifonjers were staring at him. The bull’s eyes were nut-brown, like spheres of mahogany, the dam’s the same colour, glistening with fear. The calves were down in the dust, hiding their eyes, since it is well known amongst the very young that monsters that you cannot see cannot see you either.
The falling Nathan saw him though, the direction of his gaze being easy to determine, its searchlight beam isolating him in an ellipse of brightness, etching his shadow in black on the closed door behind him. On the windowsill outside the cats now sat, looking in, preparing in their minds for an alteration to the ledger, the ginger cat sitting near to the place where it had scratched the tally, one paw lifted as if it was begging for scraps from a table.
What was Nathan expected to do? What had he planned to do when he opened the door? The laws of Waterblack outlined the procedure, but he was ignorant of them. That said, is it not to be assumed that the Master of a city exists in concert with that place? Is he not, in some important way, the same as it? In his sympathies, in his understandings, in his moods and attitudes, in his outlook, in his temperament, in his telos, to use an ancient term, a Master and his city can be identical, and since laws are as much derived from the city within which they are enforced as they are determining of it, those laws can be known by its Master by force of the above similarity, even if the rational mind does not know them explicitly. They are implicit. They are intuited.
Intuitively, then, Nathan did what he had to do. He turned away from the window, raised himself up from his hands and knees, and stood to meet the blue Nathan. He came down from the sky, from the Manse of Mordew, but that city could no longer offer him protection; it was here under the water, drowned of its magic. It was taken in segment and iterated in a room in a street in the City of Death, where death was the first and principal law.
The blue Nathan seemed confused: when he blinked the torchlight of his eyes flickered, when he squinted the torchlight dimmed, when he raised his hand to shade his gaze, to clarify whether what he thought he saw was what was in front of him, he stayed where he was in the air.
A Nathan catalysed and in the full blossom of his anger can walk through the skies of Mordew, but only if he does it with absolute certainty of himself. Otherwise, he is prone to the physical forces that operate on us all, and in Waterblack, affected by a new self-consciousness brought on by seeing himself in the alifonjers’ enclosure, Nathan’s focus wavered, his light faltered, and he was drawn downward by the heaviness of the world. His conscience was heavy too, unsilenced as it now was by the rushing wind of power in his ears. ‘Who
are you?’ he called over to himself, his feet meeting the earth as the last word left his lips.
Nathan didn’t answer with words, but instead he sprinted low across the dust and slid, kicking the sky Nathan’s feet out from under him.
It is disconcerting to be woken from a Spark rage, disconcerting to be attacked by oneself, disconcerting to find oneself down to earth, and people who are disconcerted make poor fighters. Avengers, revengers, punishers – those with wrongs to right – are very much better at violence, since they know to what it is applied, and the consequences of not applying it. They have the advantage of certainty at their disposal. It should not be surprising, therefore, to know that the Waterblack Nathan was soon on top of the Mordew Nathan, with his hands around that boy’s neck.
Strangling is a difficult way to kill a person, and strangling yourself, some will say, is impossible, at least by hand. The job’s even more difficult when you are looking yourself in the eye. When you are being strangled, you do not properly understand what is going on; the deficit of air, a substance necessary for the adequate consideration of events, increasingly robs the experience of being choked to death of its clarity, qua experience. This failure to comprehend the world becomes written on the expressions of the face, even as that face reddens and its eyes bulge.
When the strangler is yourself, in a separate body, and your face wears a look of grim and absolute commitment to murder, the object of which is you, and your teeth are gritted, spittle bubbling at the corners of your mouth as you pant hard with the effort of depriving yourself of your life’s breath, nostrils flaring, eyes wide, it is very difficult to understand what is happening.
Pain drives out thought, eventually. There are sensitive structures below the skin of the neck – the oesophagus, the larynx, the network of veins and arteries – and the body does not appreciate the rough treatment of these things, so it causes pain when they are aggressed against, to spur the mind to resist. Worse is the pain that comes in the head when fluids that must return to the lungs for oxygen are stoppered up inside the skull, making a swelling pressure that forces the brain into less space than it needs. Oesophagus, larynx, arteries, veins: these things are important, certainly, but not more important than the brain.
After all, what is a person if not a creation of the cerebral organ?
When the brain is in danger, the body expresses this fact in the unbearable sensation of agony, which is worse than pain. The Mordew Nathan felt this agony, and along with it a terrible and fearful uncertainty, and the sense that he was killing himself, and, behind it, neutering even the possibility that he might defend himself somehow in a superhuman show of strength, the dreamlike conviction that this was not, and could not be, real.
As his mind received less and less of the air it needed to think, this conviction of unreality took over, and Mordew Nathan died as if in a nightmare, expecting to wake up but never doing so.