Toll the Hounds
‘With a cold smile,’ Traveller continued, as if not hearing her, ‘he waits. Where all the roads converge, where every path ends. He waits.’ A dozen heartbeats passed, with nothing more said.
To the north something burned, lancing bright orange flames into the sky, lighting the bellies of churning clouds of black smoke. Like a beacon… ‘What burns?’ Traveller wondered.
Samar Dev spat again. She just couldn’t get that foul taste out of her mouth. ‘Karsa Orlong,’ she replied. ‘Karsa Orlong burns, Traveller. Because that is what he does.’
‘I do not understand you.’
‘It’s a pyre,’ she said. ‘And he does not grieve. The Skathandi are no more.’
‘When you speak of Karsa Orlong,’ Traveller said, ‘I am frightened.’ She nodded at that admission-a response he probably could not even see. The man beside her was an honest one. In many ways as honest as Karsa Orlong. And on the morrow these two would meet. Samar Dev well understood Traveller’s fear. The bulls ever walk alone to the solitude Of their selves
Swaggering in their coats of sweaty felt Every vein swollen
Defiant and proud in their beastly need Thunderous in step
Make way make way the spurting swords Slay damsel hearts
Cloven the cut gaping wide-so tender an attitude! And we must swoon
Before red-rimmed eyes you’ll find no guilt In the self so proven And the fiery charge of most fertile seed Sings like gods’ rain
Make way make way another bold word
The dancer’s sure to misstep
In the rushing drums of the multitude
Dandies of the Promenade Seglora
Expectation is the hoary curse of humanity. One can listen to words, and see them as the unfolding of a petal or, indeed, the very opposite: each word bent and pushed tighter, smaller, until the very packet of meaning vanishes with a flip of deft fingers. Poets and tellers of tales can be tugged by either current, into the riotous conflagration of beauteous language or the pithy reduction of the tersely colourless.
As with art, so too with life. See a man without fingers standing at the back of his house. He is grainy with sleep that yields no rest, no relief from a burdensome world (and all that), and his eyes are strangely blank and might be shuttered too as he stares out on the huddled form of his wife as she works some oddity in her vegetable patch.
This one is terse. Existence is a most narrow aperture indeed. His failing is not in being inarticulate through some lack of intellect. No, this mind is most finely honed. But he views his paucity of words-in both thought and dialogue-as a virtue, sigil of rigid manhood. He has made brevity an obsession, an addiction, and in his endless paring down he strips away all hope of emotion and with it em-pathy. When language is lifeless what does it serve? When meaning is rendered down what veracity holds to the illusion of depth?
Bah! to such conceits! Such anal self-serving affectation! Wax extravagant and let the world swirl thick and pungent about you! Tell the tale of your life as you would live it!
A delighted waggle of fingers now might signal mocking cruelty when you are observing this fingerless man who stands silent and expressionless as he studies his woman. Decide as you will. His woman. Yes, the notion belongs to him, art-fully whittled from his world view (one of expectation and fury at its perpetual failure). Possession has its rules and she must behave within the limits those rules prescribe. This was, to Gaz, self-evident, a detail that did not survive his own manic editing.
But what was Thordy doing with all those flat stones? With that peculiar pat-tern she was building there in the dark loamy soil? One could plant nothing be-neath stone, could one? No, she was sacrificing fertile ground, and for what? Hi didn’t know. And he knew that he might never know. As an activity, however, Thordy’s diligent pursuit was a clear transgression of the rules, and he might have to do something about that. Soon.
Tonight he would beat a man to death. Exultation, yes, but a cold kind. Flies buzzing in his head, the sound rising like a wave, filling his skull with a hundred thousand icy legs. He would do that, yes, and this meant he didn’t have to beat his wife-not yet, anyway; a few more days, maybe a week or so-he would have to see how things went.
Keep things simple, give the flies not much to land on, that was the secret. The secret to staying sane.
The wedges of his battered fingerless hands burned with eager fire.
But he wasn’t thinking much of anything at all, was he? Nothing to reach his face, his eyes, the flat line of his mouth. Sigil of manhood, this blank facade, and when a man has nothing else at least he could have that. And he would prove it to himself again and again. Night after night.