The Drowned World - Ballard James Graham - Страница 33

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"The Feast of Skulls!"

Goblet raised in the flare-light, its amber contents spilling over his suit, Strangman let out an exultant shout, with a flourish leapt down from the fountain as the tumbril cart swerved across the cob. bled square. Propelled by six sweating, bare-chested sailors bent double between its shafts, it rattled and jolted through the quick… ening embers of the charcoal fires, a dozen hands helping it on its way, and to a final accelerating crescendo on the drums struck the edge of the dais and tipped its white gleaming cargo across the boards at Kerans' feet. Immediately a chanting circle formed around him, hands beat out an excited rantando, white teeth flashed and snapped at the air like demoniac dice, hips swivelled and heels stamped. The Admiral dived forward and cleared a way through the whirling torsos, and Big Caesar, a steel trident held in front of him with a huge bale of red kelp and fucus transfixed on its barbs, lurched onto the dais and with a grunting heave tossed the dripping fronds into the air over the throne.

Kerans swayed forward helplessly as the sweet, acrid weeds cascaded around his head and shoulders, the lights of the dancing flares reflected in the gilt arm-rests of the throne. As the rhythm of the drums beat around him, almost exorcising the deeper pulse booming faintly in the base of his mind, he let his weight hang against the bloodied thongs around his wrists, indifferent to the pain as he sank in and out of consciousness. At his feet, at the base of the throne, the broken white harvest of bones gleamed with their ivory whiteness: slender tibias and femurs, scapulas like worn trowels, a mesh of ribs and vertebrae, even two lolling skulls. The light flickered across their bald pates and winked in the empty eye sockets, leaping from the bowls of kerosene borne by the corridor of statues which led towards the throne across the square. The danc ers had formed themselves into a long undulating line, and with Strangman prancing at their head began to weave in and out of the marble nymphs, the drummers around the fires pivoting in their seats to follow their progress.

Given a momentary respite as they circled the square, Kerans lolled against the velvet back-rest, pulling automatically at his clamped wrists. The kelp trailed around his neck and shoulders, falling over his eyes from the tin crown Strangman had clamped to his brow. Almost dry, the kelp exuded its sweaty stench, and covered his arms so that only a few ragged strips of his dinner jacket were visible. At the edge of the dais, beyond the litter of bones and rum bottles, were more drifts of the weed, and a debris of conches and dismembered star-fish with which they had pelted him before finding the mausoleum.

Twenty feet behind him towered the dark bulk of the depot ship, a few lights still burning on its decks. For two nights the parties had continued, the tempo mounting hour by hour, Strangman apparently determined to exhaust his crew. Kerans drifted helplessly in a half-conscious reverie, his pain dulled by the rum forced down his throat (evidently the final indignity, drowning Neptune in an even more magical and potent sea), mild concussion cloaking the scene before him in a mist of blood and scotomata. Dimly he was aware of his torn wrists and lacerated body, but he sat patiently, stoically acting out the role of Neptune into which he had been cast, accepting the refuse and abuse heaped upon him as the crew discharged their fear and hatred of the sea. In that role, too, or its caricature which he performed, lay his only safety. Whatever hi motives, Strangman still seemed reluctant to kill him, and the crew reflected this hesitation, always disguising their insults and tortures res in the form of grotesque and hilarious jokes, protecting themselves when they pelted him with sea-weed by half-pretending to make an offering to an idol.

The snake of dancers reappeared and formed itself into a chanting circle around him. Strangman detached himself from its centre-he was obviously reluctant to come too close to Kerans, perhaps afraid that the bleeding wrists and forehead would make him realise the crudity of the jape-and Big Caesar came forward, his huge knobbed face like an inflamed hippo's. Lumbering about to the rhythm of the bongos, he selected a skull and femur from the pile of bones around the throne, began to beat out a tattoo for Kerans, tapping the varying thicknesses of the temporal and occipital lobes to pick out a crude cranial octave. Several others joined in, and with a rattle of femur and tibia, radius and ulna, a mad dance of the bones ensued. Weakly, only half aware of the grin. fling, insulting faces pressed to within a foot or two of his own, Kerans waited for this to subside, then leaned back and tried to shield his eyes as a salvo of star-shells burst overhead and for a moment illuminated the depot ship and the surrounding buildings. This signalled the end of the festivity and the start of another night's work. With a shout, Strangman and the Admiral pulled apart the dancing group. The cart was hauled away, metal rims ringing over the cobbles, and the kerosene flares were extinguished. Within a minute the square was dark and empty, a few gutted fires sputtering among the cushions and drums, intermittently reflected in the gilt limbs of the throne and the white bones encircling it.

Now and then, at intervals through the night, a small group of looters would reappear, wheeling their booty in front of them, a bronze statue or a section of portico, hoist them into the ship and then vanish again, ignoring the motionless figure hunched on the throne among the shadows. By now Kerans was asleep, unaware of his fatigue and hunger, waking for a few minutes before dawn at the coolest ebb of the night to shout for Beatrice. He had not seen her since his capture after Bodkin's death, and assumed that Strangman had locked her away within the depot ship.

At last, after the exploding night with its bravura of drums and star-shells, the dawn lifted over the shadow-filled square, drawing behind it the immense golden canopy of the sun. Within an hour the square and the drained streets around it were silent, only amp; distant whir of an air-conditioner in the depot ship reminding Keians that he was not alone. Somehow, by a manifest miracle, had survived the previous day, sitting out unprotected in the full noon heat, shaded by only the cloak of weeds trailing from his crown. Like a stranded Neptune, he looked out from this make shift pavilion of sea weed at the carpet of bnlhant light covering the bones and garbage. Once he had been aware of a hatchway opening onto a deck above, and sensed that Strangman had come from his cabin to observe him-a few minutes later several buckets of icy water were tossed down onto him. He sipped feverishly the cold drops falling from the weeds into his mouth like frozen pearls. Immediately afterwards he sank off into a profound torpor, waking after dusk just before the night's festivities were to begin.

Then Strangman had come down in his pressed white suit and examined him critically, in a strange access of pity suddenly murmured: "Kerans, you're still alive, how do you do it?"

It was this remark which sustained him through the second day, when the white carpet at noon lay over the square in incandescent layers a few inches apart, like the planes of parallel universes crystallised Out of the continuum by the immense heat. Across his skin the air burned like a flame. He stared listlessly at the marble statues, and thought of Hardman, moving through the pillars of light on his way towards the mouth of the sun, disappearing over the dunes of luminous ash. The same power which saved Hardman seemed to have revealed itself within Kerans, in some way adjusting his metabolism so that he could survive the unbroken heat. Still he was watched from the deck above. Once a large salamander three feet long had darted among the bones towards him, its insane teeth like flints of obsidian flexing slowly as it scented Kerans, and a single shot had roared out from the deck, smashing the lizard into a writhing bloodied mess at his feet.

Like the reptiles which sat motionlessly in the sunlight, he waited patiently for the day to end.

Again Strangman seemed baffled to find him, swaying in an exhausted delirium but still alive. A fficker of nervousness creased his mouth, and he glanced irritably at Big Caesar and the crew waiting around the dais in the torchlight, apparently as surprised as himself. When Strangman began to whoop and shout for drums the response was markedly less prompt.

Determined to break Kerans' power for once and for all, Strangman ordered two additional casks of rum lowered from the depot ship, hoping to drive from his men's minds their unconscious fear of Kerans and the paternal guardian of the sea he now symbolised. Soon the square was filled with noisy stumbling figures, tipping their jugs and bottles to their lips, tap dancing on the drum skins. Accompanied by the Admiral, Strangman moved swiftly from one Party to another, inciting them to further acts of extravagance. Big Caesar donned the alligator head and tottered about the square on his knees, a whooping troupe of drummers behind him.

Wearily Kerans waited for the climax. At Strangman's instruc tions the throne was lifted from the dais and lashed to the cart Kerans lay back limply against the head-rest, looking up at the dark flanks of the buildings as Big Caesar heaped the bones and sea-weed around his feet. With a shout from Strangman the drunken procession set off, a dozen men fighting to get between the shafts of the tumbril, throwing it from left to right across the square and knocking down two of the statues. Amid a chorus of excited. orders from Strangman and the Admiral, who raced along be… side the wheels, trying helplessly to restrain it, the cart rapidly gathered speed and veered away into a side-street, careened along the pavement before demolishing a rusty lamp-standard. Bludgeoning the curly pates of the men around him with his massive fists, Big Caesar fought his way to the front of the shafts, seized one in each hand and enforced a more leisurely progress.

High above their heads, Kerans sat in the rocking throne, the cool air slowly reviving him. He watched the ceremony below with semi-conscious detachment, aware that they were moving systematically down every street in the drained lagoon, almost as if he were an abducted Neptune forced against his will to sanctify those sections of the drowned city which had been stolen from him by Strangman and reclaimed.

But gradually, as the exertion of pulling the cart cleared their heads and made them move in step, the men between the shafts began to sing what sounded like the lay of an old Haitian cargo cult, a deep crooning melody that again underlined their ambivalent attitude towards Kerans. In an effort to reestablish the real purpose of the outing, Strangman began to shout and brandish his flare pistol, after a short scrimmage made them reverse the direction of the cart so that they pushed it instead of pulled. As they passed the planetarium Big Caesar leapt up on to the cart, clinging to the throne like an immense ape, picked up the alligator's head and clamped it down over Kerans' shoulders.

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