Green Eyes

Chapter 19

Donnell was standing beside the veve when Jocundra and the Baron came down from the hill. Hearing their footsteps, he glanced up. His skin was pale and his eyes were terminal, the pupils gone inside radiant green flares. She ran toward him, but he thrust out his hand and boomed her with such force that she held up a dozen feet away.

‘They’re all over,’ he said dully. ‘All goddamn over!’ He slammed his fist against the veve, and the copper bulged downward half a foot. He lifted the fist to his eyes, as if inspecting a peculiar root; then, with an inarticulate yell, he struck again and again at the strut, battering the welded strips apart. His hand was bleeding, already swelling.

‘Please, Donnell,’ she said. ‘Get back on it. Maybe…’

‘Too late,’ he said, and pointed to a spray of broken blood vessels on his forehead. ‘I was dead the second he hit me. It changed them, it…’

She started toward him again.

‘Stay the hell away,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to end up twitching at your gates, mauling you like some damned animal!’ He looked at her, nodding. ‘Now I know what all those other poor freaks saw.’

‘He ain’t got no way to come to you,’ said the Baron, pulling at Jocundra’s arm. ‘Get away from him.’

But everything was balling up inside her chest, and her legs felt weak and watery, as if the beginning of grief was also the beginning of an awful incompetence. She couldn’t move.

‘They wanted to wallow in life right until the moment their hearts were snatched,’ said Donnell. ‘And, oh Jesus, it’s a temptation to me now!’ He turned away.

‘God, Donnell!’ she said, clapping her hands to her head in frustration. ‘Please try!’ The Baron put his arm around her, and its weight increased her weakness, dissolved the tightness in her chest into tears.

‘Where’s Otille?’ asked Donnell casually, seeming to notice the Baron for the first time.

The Baron stiffened. ‘What you want with her? She crazy gone to hell. She past hurtin’ anyone, past takin’ care of herself.’

‘They can do wonders nowadays,’ said Donnell. ‘I better make sure.’

The Baron kept silent.

‘Where else,’ said Donnell. ‘She’s upstairs.’

‘Yeah man!’ said the Baron defiantly. ‘She upstairs. So what you wanna mess with her for?’

‘It needs to be done,’ said Donnell, thoughtful.

‘What you talkin’ ‘bout?’ The Baron strode forward and swung his fist, but Donnell caught it - as easily as a man catching a rubber ball - and squeezed until it cracked, bringing the Baron to his knees, groaning; he flung out his hand at the Baron, fingers spread. When nothing happened, he appeared surprised.

‘What you want to hurt her for?’ said the Baron, cradling his hand. ‘Hurtin’ her ain’t ‘bout nothin’.’

Donnell ignored him. He opened his mouth to speak to Jocundra, but only jerked his head to the side and laughed.

It was such a corroded laugh, so dead of hope, it twisted into her. She moved close and put her arms around him; and at a distance, curtained off from her voice by numbness, despair, she heard herself asking him to try again. He just stood there, his hands on her waist.

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe I…’

‘What?’ She had a flicker of hope. Nothing concrete; it was unreasonable, all-purpose hope.

His fingers had worked up under her blouse, and he rubbed the ball of his thumb across her stomach. He said something. It started with a peculiar gasp and ended with a noise deep in his throat and it sounded like words in a guttural language: a curse or a fierce blessing. Then he pushed her away. The push spun her around, and by the time she had regained her balance, he was gone. She could hear him crashing through the thickets; but dazedly staring at the place where he had stood, she kept expecting him to reappear.

The dark shell of the house was empty. Splinters of glass glinted on the stairs between the shadows of the shredded blinds. Climbing up to the attic took all his self-control, his training; he wanted to go running back to her, to breathe her in again, to let his life bleed away into hers. Even the knowledge that the way was closed did not diminish his desire to return to the veve, to try once more, and only his compulsion to duty drove him onward. He hesitated on the top step; then, angry at his weakmindedness, he rattled the knob of the attic door. It was locked, but the wood split and the lock came half-out in his hand. He kicked the door open and stepped inside.

Part of the roof was missing, and the moonlight shone on a shambles of burst crates and broken furniture and unrolled bolts of cloth. All Otille’s treasures looted and vandalized, their musty perfumes dissipated by the humid smell of the night. It was strange, he thought as he walked toward the three doors, that killing Otille was to be the summary act of his existence, the resolution of his days at Shadows, his life with Jocundra, healing. It seemed inappropriate. Yet it was essential. These aberrations had caused enough trouble in the worlds, and it had been past due that someone be elected to befriend the cadre and eliminate the seam of weakness, disperse the recruits, punish the High Aspect and her officers. He had been an obvious choice; after all, twice before the Aspects at Badagris had dealt with the cadre of Mounanchou. Such purges were becoming a tradition. It might well be time for a restructuring of the cadre’s valence, for bringing forth an entirely new aspect from the fires of Ogoun. He was nagged by a moral compunction against the killing, and the frailty of the thought served to remind him how badly he needed a period of meditation. Disdainful of her guessing games, he ripped the central door of the Replaceable Room off its hinges, lowered his shoulder, and charged along the passage. He shattered the second door with ease, but as he came to his feet, he experienced a wave of weakness and dislocation.

The roof of the apartment had been torn off, and the light of moon and stars gave the walls and bushes the look of a real forest. A clearing in a forest. Hanks of moss had been blown into the room and were draped over the branches. An oak had caved in part of the far wall, and through the branch-enlaced gap he could see a tiny orange glow. Probably somebody night fishing, somebody who didn’t know better than to venture near Maravillosa. Otille was standing behind a shrub about twenty feet away; a branch divided her face, a crack forking across her ivory skin. She sprinted for the door, but he cut her off. She caught herself up, flattened against the wall, and began to edge back.

‘Come here,’ he said.

‘Please, Donnell,’ she said, groping her way. ‘Let me go.’ The O sound became a shrinking wail, and then a word. ‘Ogoun.’ She shivered, blinked, as if waking from a dream. Her silk robe, which hung open, was speckled with leaves and mold, and a large bruise darkened her hip. Her eyes flicked back and forth between Donnell and the door, but her face was frozen in a terrified expression. Black curls matted her cheeks, making it appear her head was gripped within the scrollwork cage of a torturer’s restraint. ‘Let me go!’ she screamed, demanding it.

‘Is that what you really want?’ He kept his voice insistent and even. ‘Do you want to go on hurting yourself, hurting everyone, screwing your sting into people’s lives until they curl up in your web and waste?’ He eased a step nearer. ‘It’s time to end this, Otille.’

She edged further away, but not too far. ‘I’m afraid,’ she said.

‘Better to die than go on hurting yourself,’ he said, inching forwards, trying to minister her madness, seduce her with the sorry truth. ‘Think about the suffering you’ve caused. You should have seen Valcours die, bleeding from the eyes, his bones crunching like candy. Downey, Clea, Dularde, Simpkins, all your supporters. Gone, dead, vanished. You’re alone now. What’s there to look forward to but madness and brief periods of clarity when you can see the trail of corpses numbering your days, and feel sorrow and revulsion. Better to die, Otille.’

She raised her hand to her cheek, and the gesture transformed her face into that of a young girl, still frightened but hopeful. ‘Ogoun?’ she asked.

‘I am his judgment,’ he said, wondering at the archaic sound of his words, gauging the distance between them.

Otille blinked, alert again, tipped her head to one side and said, ‘No, Donnell.’ Her left hand, which had been shielded behind her, flashed up and down so quickly that he did not realize she held a knife until he saw the hilt standing out from his chest. A gold hand was carved gripping it. The blade had struck his collarbone dead on, deflected upward, and stuck; she tried to pull it out and stab once more, but her fingers slipped off the hilt as he staggered back.

Angry at his carelessness, he plucked it out and threw it into a far corner. The wound was shallow, seeping blood. ‘That was your last chance,’ he said. ‘And I don’t even think you wanted to take it.’

She pressed against the wall, her head drooping onto her shoulder in a half swoon, her eyelids fluttering, helpless; but he could not lift his hand to strike. For the moment she seemed fragile, lovely, a creature deserving a merciful judgment, involved in this tortuous nightmare through no fault of her own. Seeing his hesitation, she hurled herself toward the door; he dove after her, clutching an ankle and dragging her down. He scrambled to his feet, still hesitant. His cold and calculating mood had fled, and he was not sure he could do it. One second she was a monster or a pitiful madwoman, the next a lady frail as alabaster or a little girl, as if she were inhabited by a legion of lost souls not all of whom merited death. And now she stared at him, another soul duly incarnated, this one displaying the sulky pout of adolescence, ignorant and sexual: a black-eyed child with pretty breasts and a dirt-smeared belly. A trickle of sweat crawled into the tuck of skin between her thigh and abdomen. He was bizarrely attracted, then disgusted; he stepped around her and opened the first door of the Replacement Room.

‘Go on in,’ he said. “This is the way out.’

Stupefied, she pushed herself up onto an elbow, gazing into the dimly lit passage, her head wobbling.

‘You can’t hush up what’s happened, Otille. Not this time. You’re too far gone to deal with it. And you know what they’ll do? They’ll lock you up somewhere a thousand miles from Maravillosa, in a room with iron bars on the windows and a bed with leather cuffs and leg straps, and a mirror that won’t break no matter how hard you hit it, and a blazing light bulb hung so high you can’t reach it even if you stand on a chair and jump. And all you’ll hear at night will be muffled screams and scurrying footsteps.’

There was no indication that she heard him. She continued to gaze into the room, her head swaying back and forth, lids drooping, as if the sight were making her very, very sleepy.

‘And in the day, maybe, if you don’t mess the floor or scream too much or spit out your medication, they’ll let you into a big sunlit room, the sun shafting down from high windows so bright the light seems to be buzzing inside your ears and melting the glass and glowing in the cracks. And there’ll be other women wearing the same starched gray shift as you, and their faces will be the same as yours, dulled and lined and depressed about something they just can’t get straight, gnawing their fingers, talking to the cockroaches, shrieking and having to be restrained. Sometimes they’ll wander silent as dust around the room, the loony housewives and the mad nuns and the witchy crone who eats cigarette butts and dribbles ash. And there you’ll be forever, Otille, because they’ll never turn you loose.’

Otille got to her feet, shrinking from the room but unable to tear her eyes off it.

‘They’ll stuff you with pills that turn the air to shadowy water, put larvae in your food that uncurl and breed in your guts, give you shots to make you crazier. Electro-shock. Maybe they’ll cut out part of your brain. Why not? No one will be using it, and nobody will care. The doctors and lawyers will grow gray-haired and fat spending your fortune, and you’ll just sit there under your light bulb trying to remember what you were thinking. And in the end, Otille, you’ll be old. Old and dim and sexless with one sodden black thought flapping around inside your skull like a sick bat.’

Without any fuss Otille took a stroll into the room. She ran her eye along the walls, her attention held briefly by something near the ceiling. The calmness of her inspection was horrifying, as if she were checking a gas chamber for leaks prior to consigning her mortality to it. Then she turned, her slack features firming to a look of fearful comprehension, and darted at him.

The attack caught him off guard. He tripped and landed on his back, and she was all over him. Kneeing, biting, scratching. She had the strength of madness, and he was hard put to throw her off and climb to his feet. As she circled, looking for an opening, it seemed to him a wild animal had become tangled in her robe. Her eyes were holes punched through onto a starless night; her breath was hoarse and creaky. Every nerve in her face was jumping, making it look as though she were shedding her skin. She rushed him again. Wary of her strength, he sidestepped and hit her in the ribs. The bones gave, and she reeled against the wall. He aimed a blow at her head, but she ducked; his fist impacted a carved trunk, and ebony splinters flew. Panting, she backed away. She stroked her broken ribs and hissed, appearing to derive pleasure from the wound. Then she let out a feral scream and threw herself at him. This time he drew her into a bear hug, and she accepted the embrace. Her hands locked in his hair, her legs wrapped around his thigh, and she sank her teeth into his shoulder, tearing at his tendon strings. He yanked her head back by the hair. Blood was smeared over her mouth, and she spat something -something that oozed down his cheek, something he realized was a scrap of his flesh - and tried to shake free. He took a couple of turns of her hair around his wrist, pried a leg loose, walked over to the door of the Replaceable Room and slammed her against the wall. She lay stunned and moaning, her hair splayed out beneath her head like a crushed spider.

‘Oh, God. Donnell,’ she said weakly. She reached out to him, and he squatted beside her, taking her hand.

He should finish her, he thought; it would be the kindest thing. But she had regained her humanity, her beauty, and he could not. From the angle of her hips, he judged her back was broken; she did not appear to be in pain, though - only disoriented. She whispered, and he bent close. Her lips grazed his ear. He couldn’t make out the words; they were a dust of sound, yet they had the ring of a term of endearment, a lover’s exhalation. He drew back, not far, and considered her face a few inches below. So delicate, all the ugly tensions withdrawn. He felt at a strange distance from her, as if he were a tiny bird soaring above the face of the universe, a floor of bone and ivory centered by a red plush mouth which lured him down, whirling him in a transparent column of breath. Half-formed phrases flittered through his thoughts, memories of sexual ritual, formal exchanges of energy and grace, and he found himself kissing her. Her lips were salty with his blood, and as if in reflex, her tongue probed feebly. He scrambled to his feet, repelled.

‘Donnell,’ she said, her voice rough-edged and full of hatred. And then she pushed up onto her arms and began dragging her broken lower half toward him. Dark blood brimmed between her lips.

He stepped back quickly and closed the door.

He went to the carpeted depression at the center of the room, knelt beside the control panel and began flicking the switches two and three at a time. As he engaged a switch on the middle row, her voice burst from the speaker, incoherent. A harsh babble with the rhythm and intensity of an incantation. He switched her off, continuing down the rows, and at last heard the grumble of machinery, the whine of the pumps. He waited beside the panel until the whine had ceased, until whatever was going to die had managed it.

It was very quiet, the sort of blanketing stillness that pours in between the final echo of an explosion and the first cries of its victims. The quietness confused him, lending an air of normalcy to the room, and he was puzzled by his sudden lack of emotion, as if now that he had completed his task, he had been reduced to fundamentals. He stood and almost fell, overwhelmed by the bad news his senses were giving him about death: dizziness, white rips across his vision, his chest thudding with erratic heartbeat.

Done.

Stamp the seal of fate, tie a black cord round the coffin and make a knot only angels can undo.

Both life and duty, done.

Filled with bitterness, he smashed his heel into the control panel, crumpling the metal facing. Smoke fumed from the speaker grille. Then he spun around, sensing Jocundra behind him. No. She was elsewhere, coming toward the house, and she seemed to surround him, every sector of the air holding some intimation. He could taste her, feel her on his skin. He started to the door, thinking there might be time to go back downstairs.

No, not really.

Not according to the twinges at the base of his skull or the dissolute feeling in his chest.

The leaves on the ebony bushes seemed to be stirring, and the dark loom of the forested walls held lifelike gleams of color, a depth of light and foliage showing between the trunks. To the south a road of pale sand plunged off through the trees, and at the bend of the road was a tiny orange glow. He laughed, recalling the light he had seen earlier in the gap made by the toppled oak; but he walked toward it anyway. The place where the road left the clearing was choked with branches, and they scratched him when he crouched to gain an unimpeded view. He must be very near the edge, three floors up, yet all he saw beneath was the starlit dust of the road. He shifted his field of focus toward the glow. The orange light rose from a metal ring, and beside it, sitting with his back against a stump, was a lean, wolfish man. Heavy eyebrows, dark hair flowing over his shoulders. He appeared to be gazing intently at Donnell, and he waved; his mouth opened and closed as if he were calling out.

Someone did call to him, but it was Jocundra, her voice faint and issuing from a different quarter. He forced all thought of her aside. Without access to his ourdha, it would be essential to concentrate, to synchronize thought with vision, or else the winds would take him and there would be no hope of return. He pressed forward into the gap, ducking under the branches. Right on the edge, he figured. He shifted his field of focus beyond the wolfish man, who was now waving excitedly, and out to the bend in the road. The forest plummeted into a valley, and below, nestled in a crook of the river, were the scattered orange lights of Badagris. Above the town and forest, the aurora billowed, and higher yet were icy stars thick as gems on a jewel merchant’s cloth.

Pain lanced through his chest, an iron spike of it drove up the column of his neck. His vision blurred, and to clear his head he fixed his eyes on the hard glitter of the stars. Something about their pattern was familiar. What was it? Then he remembered. The Short War against Akadja, the Plain of Kadja Bossu. There had been a night skirmish with a company of dyobolos, a difficult victory, and afterward he had stood watch on a hummock, the only high ground for miles. The myriad fires of the cadre burning about him, the sable grass hissing with a continental pour of wind. It had seemed to him he was suspended in the night overlooking a plain of stars, its guardian, its ruler, and he had thought of it as a vision of his destiny. Solitary, rigorous, lordly. Yet he had been much younger, barely past induction, and despite the elegance of the vision, the clarity, it had been a comfort to know the war was over for a little while, that the shadows in the grass were friends, and the hours until dawn could be a time of peaceful meditation. The memory was so poignant, so vivid in its emotional detail, that when a branch scraped at the corner of his eye, aggravated by the distraction, he knocked it away with his hand - a black, featureless hand - and thinking to avoid further aggravation, he took another step and shifted forward along the road.