Grimus

I Flapping Eagle

MR VIRGIL JONES, a man devoid of friends and with a tongue rather too large for his mouth, was fond of descending this cliff-path on Tiusday mornings. (Mr Jones, something of a pedant and interested in the origins of things, referred to the days of his week as Sunday, Moon-day, Tiusday, Wodensday, Thorsday, Freyday and Saturnday; it was affectations like this, among other things, that had left him friendless.) It was five a.m.; for no reason, Mr Jones habitually chose this entirely random time to indulge his liking for Calf Island’s one small beach. Accordingly, he was tripping goat-fashion down the downward spiral of the path, trailing in the nimbler wake of a hunchbacked crone called Dolores O’Toole, who had an exceptionally beautiful walnut rocking-chair strapped to her back. The strap was Mr Jones’ belt. Which meant he was obliged to use both his hands to hold his trousers up. This kept him fairly preoccupied.

Some more facts about Mr Jones: he was gross of body and short of sight. His eyes blinked a lot, refusing to believe in their myopia. He had three initials: V. B. C. Jones, Esq. The B was for Beauvoir and the C for Chanakya. These were historical names, names to conjure with, and Mr Jones, though no conjurer, considered himself something of an historian. Today, as he arrived at the dead greysilver sands of his chosen island, surrounded by the greysilver mists that hung forever upon the surrounding, sundering seas, he was about to make his rendezvous with a small historical event. If he had known, he would have philosophized at length about the parade of history, about the historian’s inability to stand apart and watch; it was erroneous, he would have said, to look upon oneself as an Olympian chronicler; one was a member of the parade. An historian is affected by the present events that eternally recreate the past. He would have thought this earnestly, although for some time now the parade had been progressing without his help. However, because he was shortsighted, because of the mist and because he was trying to keep his trousers on, he didn’t see the body of one Flapping Eagle floating in on the incoming tide; and Dolores O’Toole was spared the trouble of being an audience.

Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment. Flapping Eagle, coming in fast now on the crest of a wave, was about to discover this fact. At present he was unconscious; he had just fallen through a hole in the sea. The sea had been the Mediterranean. It wasn’t now; or not quite.

The crone Dolores placed the rocking-chair on the sands. Mr Jones supervised approvingly. The rocking-chair faced away from the sea and towards the massive forested rock of Calf Mountain, which occupied most of the island except for the small clearing, directly above the beach, where Mr Jones and Dolores lived. Mr Jones sat down and began to rock.

Dolores O’Toole was a lapsed Catholic. She sometimes took unholy pleasure in the act of stimulating herself with church, or roman, candles. She did this because she was separated from her husband but not from her desires. Her sometime spouse, Mr O’Toole, ran a drinking establishment in K, the town high on the slopes of Calf Mountain, and she disapproved of K in general, of drinkers in particular and of her husband most particularly of all. She gave vent to this disapproval by living in isolation with Virgil Jones (far from K, from Mr O’Toole’s bar and from his favourite place of recreation, Madame Jocasta’s notorious bawdy-house). And every Tiusday at dawn she carried Mr Jones’ rocking-chair to the beach.

– Crestfallen, murmured Mr Jones to himself, with his back to the sea. Crestfallen, the sea today.

The body of Flapping Eagle touched land face upwards, which explains why he hadn’t drowned. He was quite near the back of Mr Jones’ rocking-chair, and the encroaching waves pushed him ever nearer and nearer. Mr Jones and Mrs O’Toole remained oblivious of his presence.

It should be pointed out that Flapping Eagle was averagely kind and good; but he would soon be responsible for a large number of deaths. He was also as sane as the next man, but then the next man was Mr Virgil Jones.

There was an extraordinary coincidence involved in the relationship of Virgil Jones and Dolores O’Toole: they loved each other and found it impossible to declare their love. It was no beautiful love, for they were extremely ugly. It was undeclared, because each had been so badly damaged by experience that they preferred to nurture their feelings in the privacy of their own bosoms, rather than expose them to possible ridicule and rejection. So they would sit close, but separated by this privacy, and Dolores would sing cracked songs, toothless rimes of mourning and requition; while Virgil would talk his lilting elliptical talk, exercising the thoughts and the tongue which were both too large for his head to hold, and there on the deserted beach was as close as they came to joy.

Whitebeard is all my love and white beard is my desire, sang Dolores dolefully, to the rhythm of the swaying rocking-chair. Virgil, lost in thought, stroked his white-grizzled chin and did not hear.

– Language, he mused, language makes concepts. Concepts make chains. I am bound, Dotty, bound and I don’t know where. Not enough of the ether for the way of Grimus, not enough of the earth for the way of K, moving pingpongways in thought between them and you. Dolores O’Thule. Sorrow of the gods. My dear, I was not always as you see me now. The terror of the titties, I. Once. Then. Before.

– Early one morning, just as the Son was horning, I a maiden crying in the valley below, wailed Dolores.

The insensate Eagle was within a foot of the rockers.

– This island, muttered Virgil Jones firmly, but under his breath, is the most terrible place in all creation. Since we seem to survive and are not sucked into its ways, we seem to love.

He would have reflected further, on ritual, on obsession, on the neuroses and displacement activities that exile creates, on age, on entrapment, on friendship and love, on the state of his corns, on the ornithology of myth, and refined and invented thoughts in the peace of Dolores’ presence; and she would have sung further, until her songs dropped a tear from her eyes; and then they would have gone home.

But at that moment the body of Flapping Eagle came to rest against the perfectly-carved rockers of the perfectly-carved rocking-chair with the perfectly-carved dancers spiralling along them. The chair, thus affronted, stopped rocking.

– Death, exclaimed Dolores in terror. Death, from the sea…

Virgil Jones didn’t reply, having a mouth full of the sea which had lodged in Flapping Eagle’s lungs. But he, too, as he breathed life back into the stranger, was alarmed.

– No, he said eventually, willing himself and Dolores to believe it. The face is too pale.

A remarkable fact about Flapping Eagle’s arrival at Calf Island: the island-dwellers, who shouldn’t have been too surprised at his arrival, found it highly disturbing, even unnerving. Whereas Flapping Eagle himself, once he acquired a certain piece of knowledge, rapidly came to accept his arrival as entirely unremarkable.

The piece of knowledge was this:

No-one ever came to Calf Island by accident.

The mountain drew its own kind to itself.

Or perhaps it was Grimus who did that.

II Bird-Dog

THE DAY HAD begun well enough. That is to say, it resembled the previous day sufficiently (in terms of weather, temperature and mood) to give the half-sleeping young man the illusion of continuity. Yet it also differed sufficiently from the recently-passed (in terms of subtle things like the direction of the wind, the cries of the swooping birds above and the squawks of the womenfolk below) to produce an equal and opposite illusion of temporal movement. The young man was basking pleasurably in these conflicting and harmonious mirages, drifting slowly up towards consciousness, which would banish both and substitute a third illusion: the present.

I was the boy. I was Joe-Sue, Axona Indian, orphan, named ambiguously at birth because my sex was uncertain until some time later, virgin, younger brother of a wild female animal called Bird-Dog, who was scared of losing her beauty, which was ironic, for she was not beautiful. It was my (his) twenty-first birthday, too, and I was about to become Flapping Eagle. And cease to be a few other people.

(I was Flapping Eagle.)

The Axona aren’t interested in twenty-first birthdays. They celebrate only puberty, loss of virginity, proof of bravery, marriage and death. At puberty the Old took goats’ hairs and tied them like a beard round my face, while the Sham-Man anointed my newly-potent organs with the entrails of a hare, for fertility, chanting to the god Axona as he did so.

The god Axona had only two laws: he liked the Axona to chant to him as often as possible, in the field, on the toilet, while making love if concentration allowed; and he instructed the Axona to be a race apart and have no doings with the wicked world. I never had much time for the god Axona, especially after I reached puberty, because once my voice cracked it became extremely infelicitous and I gave up chanting entirely. And then there was Bird-Dog and her fondness for the outside world. If it hadn’t been for this fondness, she might never have met the pedlar Sispy; and then she might never have left, and then I might never have left, and it would all have been different. Or perhaps there would inevitably have been a Sispy.

Let me explain some things. I grew up on a table-top in what is, I believe, still known as the United States, or, colloquially, Amerindia. The table-top was self-supporting: that is to say, it produced all the food the Axona required. No Axona had ever descended from this plateau to the plains beneath; and after a few battles in which the wicked world discovered how impregnable a fortress Axona was, they left us alone. Bird-Dog was the first Axona to visit the plains as far as I know; she was certainly the first to learn the language and develop a distinct taste or affinity for them.

To understand Bird-Dog, it is necessary to know that we were orphans, Bird-Dog and Joe-Sue. My mother died moments before I was born, which is why my formal given name was Born-From-Dead. Joe-Sue is what they called me to spare me hurt. Though whether it is painless to be known for twenty-one years by a hermaphrodite’s name, which causes every eligible female to recoil for fear of breaking tabu, I leave others to judge.

My father died soon afterwards, leaving the thirteen-year-old Bird-Dog with full responsibility for me. Bird-Dog was not her formal given name. Nobody ever told me what that was. She took it for herself, as a brave’s name, at the age of sixteen.

This was not a popular move among the Axona, but Bird-Dog and I were never much loved after the death of my people. This is why: orphans in Axona are like mongrels among pedigree hounds. We were near-pariah from the moment my father passed on, and our natures exacerbated our plight.

Bird-Dog had always been a free spirit. I say this with some envy, for I never was, nor am. Conventions did not touch her, artifice never seized her. As a child she was drawn to the bow and arrow and loathed the stove and cauldron, much to the dismay of the Old. This was a stroke of luck for me. It meant she could forage food for us. It meant she was as good in the fields as most young men. Bird-Dog was a born provider. With breasts. Breasted providers were anathema to the Axona.

As I grew, the disapproval became more and more overt. Conversation would stop at the water well when I approached. Shoulders grew cold when Bird-Dog passed. Noses tilted into the air, the Axona ostracized us as far as they could. They could not expel us; we had committed no crime. But they didn’t have to like us, so they didn’t.

– Well, said Bird-Dog to me when I was sixteen (and a young, helpless sixteen I was), if they don’t want us, we can do without them.

– Yes, I said, we can do without. I said it sadly, because though I was easily influenced by Bird-Dog, I had the adolescent’s latent love of acceptability.

– We’ll just have to find our friends elsewhere. She said it casually if a little defiantly. She had obviously brooded on it for years. It was a sentence which would change our present, our future, our whole lives. Of course, Joe-Sue agreed with his big, competent, manly sister.

What Bird-Dog never accused me of, what I found out only after she had gone, was that the main reason, the true cause of our detachment from our tribe, was not our orphan status, not her manliness, not her taking of a brave’s name, not her general demeanour, not her at all. It was me, Joe-Sue.

For three reasons: first, my confused sex; second, the circumstances of my birth; and third, my pigmentation. To take them in order. To be a hermaphrodite among the Axona is to be very bad medicine. A monster. To mutate from that state into a ‘normal’ male is akin to black magic. They didn’t like that. To be what I was, born from dead, was a dire omen; if I could bring death at the moment of my birth, it would sit upon my shoulder like a vulture wherever I went. As for my colouring: the Axona are a dark-skinned race and shortish. As I grew, it became apparent that I was, inexplicably, to be fair-skinned and tallish. This further genetic aberration-whiteness-meant they were frightened of me and shied away from contact.

Because they were frightened, they gave us a measure of respect. Because I was a freak, they gave us a measure of scorn.

It goes without saying that Bird-Dog and I were very close indeed. How much she suffered because of my deformities, she never said. It was a mark of her love.

So, unconsciously, from those early days, I was being equipped for the voyage to Calf Island. I was an exile in an isolated community, and I clung to my love for my sister as a castaway to driftwood.

That day, when Bird-Dog spoke the unspeakable, she let me into a secret.

– Before I was your age I went Down, she said. I was shocked. In those days the idea of breaking the law of Axona still shocked me.

– When I was your age I went into the town, she said, and listened at a window outside an eating-place. There was a singing machine there. It sang about a creature called a bird-dog, clever, fiendish. It feared the creature. I thought: that is the brave’s name for me.

In a state of semi-shock, I asked: -What about the Demons? and my voice stuttered. How did you escape the Whirling Demons?

She tossed her head. -Easy, she said with contempt. They’re nothing at all but air, they aren’t.

Ever since that day, Bird-Dog made frequent journeys into town. She would return full of tales of moving pictures and fast-moving machines; of machines that gave water and food, and of such numbers and numbers of people… I never had the courage to accompany her. It was there, in the town, that she learnt about twenty-first birthdays. -That’s the day you’ll prove you’re a brave, she said. You’ll go into town; and what’s more You’ll go in alone.

It was also the day she met Mr Sispy and was given eternal life.

As I said, the day began well enough for young Joe-Sue. But once he was awake it gave the lie to its beginnings.

III Mr Sispy

IT WAS JOE-SUE’S birthday: I got up and went outside. The sky was a blinding blue. The table-top dotted with red-brown tents was a deep, rich green, a green thumb sticking sorely above a rich-red, barren-brown world. If the Whirling Demons were whirling below, they couldn’t catch me, and all seemed right with the world.

Bird-Dog was sitting on an outcrop of rock, a grown woman of thirty-four years, three months and four days, in rags, her hair falling blackly over the olive face. She clutched two small bottles. The one in her right hand was full of bright yellow liquid. The one in her left hand was full of bright blue liquid. Colour was rampant everywhere, except in my skin. I felt a cloud pass across the sun.

The gleam of excitement in Bird-Dog’s face as she crouched eagerly over her treasures dispelled the bleak moment.

– I’ve been down, she said, to see if the Whirling Demons are quiet today. They’re quiet. It’s all right. But her voice was absent, her eyes stared fiercely at the brightly-coloured phials.

– I met a man between here and the town, she said distantly. He gave me these.

– What are they? Who was he? Why did he give you them?

– He was a pedlar. His name was Mr Sispy. Nice man. Funny name, Sispy. He gave them to me because I wanted them.

– But what do they do?

– They’ll keep me young, she said, clutching them ever more tightly. Or at least this one will. She held up the yellow phial.

– For how long? I asked timorously. The shadow was back.

– Forever, she screamed triumphantly, and then burst into tears.

With my arms around her, moistened by her tears of frightened joy, I asked:

– What does the other one do, the blue one?

She didn’t answer at once.

Now that I am so much older, I am not at all sure what the word magician means. To Joe-Sue that day, born and raised as he was in a tribe where magic intermingled continually with daily life, it meant anyone apparently in possession of powers, or knowledge, which he himself lacked. Perhaps that’s the only sense in which the word has meaning; and by that definition, for Joe-Sue and Bird-Dog as they were then, Mr Sispy was unquestionably a magician. This is how Bird-Dog described their encounter:

– I was sitting behind a rock watching for Whirling Demons and suddenly behind me there was this voice whispering SISPY SISPY it said and I whirled fast as any demon to find where he WAS and he knew my name. Bird-Dog he whispered and the sound sounded so harsh on his lips because he spoke so softly and sighing like the breeze in a whisper it was, his voice the whole world in a whisper such a spell it was. Bird-Dog are you beautiful he asked and since he asked it it was so and I answered yes, yes I am beautiful if you say it and he said yes you are beautiful but Bird-Dog you will die such a word it sounded harsh as my name on his lips so I cried. Sispy I cried Sispy. Such a smile it was the sun in it and the summer too he smiled and I could not cry. The world is full of secrets he said and surprises. I say Sispy behind you and here I am surprising you. With a secret in my sack. I travel he said and search for the likes of you, like seeking like, passing on my little secret. The beauty of it is: with it you will stay beautiful, you will not die, you will have the gift of time to search out all you wish to seek, to learn all you wish to know, to accomplish all you wish to do, to become all you wish to be. And the horror of it is: all who possess the secret wish in the end to give it up, it weighing them down like a last straw at last, and the camel’s back bends and passes through the eye of the needle. Then he gave me the drinks, yellow for the sun and brightness and life and blue for infinity and calm and release when I want it. Life in a yellow bottle, death blue as the sky, ice-blue as steel, he said. He was so badly-dressed, a poor pedlar’s dress and a large sack of patches with drawings drawn on it and he turned to go. I said I have a brother called Born-From-Dead and today is his brave’s day, have you secrets for him? He had, the same for young Born-From-Dead, he said. Then before he went he said, for those who will not use the blue there is only one place I know of; I am going there now and someday if you will not use the blue you will come with me. And finally he said: tell your brother Born-From-Dead that all eagles come at last to eyrie and all sailors come at last to shore, SISPY SISPY he whispered to the breeze and shivered and then he wasn’t there.

Bird-Dog was not normally a voluble woman so Joe-Sue would have found her speech strange even if it had been about the weather. As it was it was shattering. She reached into a deep pocket of her rags and brought out two more bottles, identical to her own proud possessions. They were his, mine. The yellow eternity of life and the blue eternity of death. Joe-Sue took them and ran into his tent, scrabbling in the earth to bury them under his sleeping-mat. When he came out again the yellow bottle stood empty and the blue bottle lay dashed to fragments on the rock where Bird-Dog sat. -Death, she said. Death to death.

But Joe-Sue didn’t drink his. It would soon be a division between them.

After a long silence, in which distances stretched like universes in every direction, she said, with her old aggressive practicality, -Off with you now Joe-Sue, off with you to town.

So I went down the side of the Axona table-top to the plain of the Whirling Demons that I had been taught to fear; but the little whirlwinds that spring up on that barren plain soon proved, as Bird-Dog had said, to be nothing but air, so I reached the town without trouble, dancing easily out of their way. I saw automobiles and launderettes and juke-boxes and all kinds of machines and people dressed in dusty clothes with a kind of despair in their eyes; I saw it all hiding behind doors and fences and lurking in corridors and I don’t think I was seen. Finally I’d seen enough; the glimpse had infected me already and entirely though I didn’t know it yet, just as it had infected Bird-Dog.

And the people in the town were white.

A curious thing happened on my way up to the table-top. I saw an eagle sitting on a rock, about shoulder-height to me, looking at me. It stopped me in my tracks, I tell you. A great full-grown cruel-looking monster of an eagle. I moved slowly, slowly, closer and closer to the bird. It didn’t move, showed no sign of fear, as if it were expecting me. I stretched out my hands; it came peacefully into my grasp. I was astonished yet again on this astonishing day. I held it and stroked it a moment and then, abruptly, as unexpectedly violent as it had been calm, it began to fight me. Of course I released my grip rapidly, but not before that cruel beak had scarred my chest. It flew away. I watched it go; you could say a part of me went with it.

– Flapping Eagle. The voice was Bird-Dog’s. She had been watching, silently.

– That is your name. Flapping Eagle. Why else do you think the eagle came to you before attacking you? It’s your brave’s name, it must be.

– Flapping Eagle, said Joe-Sue aloud. Yes.

– It’s a name to live up to, said Bird-Dog.

– Yes, I said.

– And now’s the time to start, she said. She lay down on the rock where she had sat to watch me with the eagle, and raised her ragged skirts.

So, on one day, I was offered eternal life, broke the law of the Axona, took a brave’s name from an omen and lost my virginity to my sister. It was enough to make a fellow believe there was something special about being twenty-one.

IV Phoenix

THE SHAM-MAN ENTERED Flapping Eagle’s tent brandishing his ju-ju stick like a sad, sadistic schoolmaster, filled with deep regret for the grief he loved to cause. The Sham-Man said he only loved bringing pain to others when it was forced on him by his duty, for he loved his work. He was a huge, shambling, beaded walrus to Flapping Eagle’s tense, terse, silent oyster.

– My apologies, said the Sham-Man mournfully, for intruding. I believe we have a slightly delicate matter to discuss. (Flapping Eagle noticed his mouth; it was watering at the edges.)

– Ahem, continued the Sham-Man, I just wondered, have you any idea at all where… she… is? In common with most of the Axona, he was reluctant to concede to Bird-Dog her right to a brave’s name; also in common with most of the Axona, he’d forgotten what she had been called before.

– No, said Flapping Eagle. But she’s not here. Not in Axona.

– Precisely. You realize this puts us both into a rather awkward position? Vis a vis the law, you see.

It really was very simple. Bird-Dog’s sudden disappearance meant Flapping Eagle, as next of kin and sole surviving family, was at last open to attack by the Axona. As the lawbreaker could not be punished, so her guilt fell upon him. There was only one punishment: exile.

All that Bird-Dog had said was: I saw Sispy again today. We’re leaving. That was in the small hours of the morning. It was only later that Flapping Eagle had been struck by the thought that he was exactly as old today as Bird-Dog had been on the day she first met the pedlar. Thirty-four years, three months and four days. It was as if his future had touched her past.

It was an abrupt departure, but then the two of them had been growing away from each other ever since Flapping Eagle’s refusal to drink the yellow elixir. To him, it had been faintly nauseating to watch Bird-Dog petrified at an immutable age, her cells reproducing perfectly every day, not a hair falling that wasn’t replaced by a new one. And for Bird-Dog, the spectacle of her little brother growing up towards her daily was a constant rejection of herself and the decision she had made. It was the first and only important thing in which Flapping Eagle had not followed her lead.

They hadn’t even made love for several years; both of them missed it. Still, thought Flapping Eagle, now she’s got Sispy. A pedlar’s woman: tame ending for her.

The Sham-Man was clearing his throat again. Flapping Eagle forced himself to listen to his equivocations.

– Health, you know, said the walrus pontifically, is a tricky thing. Awfully tricky. The thing is to make sure one is always one jump ahead. Craftier than the slinking germ, if you follow me. Catch the worm before it turns, eh, eh?

The Axona were obsessed with health and cleanliness. They used more metaphors deriving from this preoccupation than the wildest hypochondriac.

– At this moment (the Sham-Man’s face shaped itself into a mask of tragedy) I’m afraid the corpse of opinion is dead against you, old chap.

– Corpus, said Flapping Eagle.

– Exactly. Dead against. Temperatures are rising. There is a fever abroad in the land, if you take my meaning. There are those who diagnose a modicum of bloodletting (his lips curled into an expression of elegant distaste) but of course I’m not wholly in agreement with them. See their point, mind you. Just don’t happen to agree. Must be my liberal upbringing.

– What is your position, asked Flapping Eagle.

– Ah. My position. Ah. Now there’s a question. I quote the sayings of Axona, correct me if I get anything wrong: “All that is Unaxona is Unclean.” I’m afraid we really can’t have contamination around here, you know. Spreads like wildfire. And before you know it, poof, there’s a disease. Nothing against you personally, naturally. Always thought you more sinned against and so forth. But there you are, what can one do, she’s got you for the high jump, I’m afraid. After all you may already be infected.

– So what do you suggest?

– Tell you what, TELL you WHAT. Why not, this evening, under cover of darkness, you follow, why not just slip away completely? Save a lot of unpleasant scenes. That’s what I suggest. Think about it. I’m really very sorry about all this.

Flapping Eagle, alone in his tent, scrabbled furiously at the floor. Then he had them: the yellow and the blue. -At least, he thought, if I am to live in the Outside, I may as well give myself one advantage. He drained the life-giving fluid. It tasted bitter-sweet. He put the blue bottle in a pocket.

I mentioned that life among the Axona prepared me in many ways for Calf Island. One of the ways was this: it taught Flapping Eagle the power of obsession.

The town was called Phoenix because it had risen from the ashes of a great fire which had completely destroyed the earlier and much larger city also called Phoenix. Nobody knew why the city had been given that name. It was a small town now.

When Livia Cramm drove through towns like Phoenix, she kept her eyes skinned, while affecting a pose of languid boredom. Mrs Cramm was a human predator; she consumed the passions of men with an entirely unwholesome glee. The unfortunate Mr Cramm, a small, bespectacled, inadequate billionaire, had long ago been drained by her of all his vital juices and expired in her crushing embrace, murmuring words of endearment and leaving her all his billions in his will. He also left her his vehicles, his horses, his Amerindian and Caucasian estates, and best of all his yacht. If there was one thing that could seduce Mrs Cramm away from seduction, it was the sea. It was a love she and Mr Cramm had shared: the only love they had shared.

– Mr Cramm, Mrs Cramm was fond of saying, in the days before she refined her speech, had a favourite joke about the sea. Whenever you’re sad or confused, he would declare, the thing to do is contemplate your naval. Navel, you see. Mr Cramm always did have a terrible sensayuma. He used to call me his Jungfrau, being something of a polyglot. When I asked him why he’d say quick as anything, baby, you sure ain’t no Freudlein!! Oh, Jee-Zuss, that sensayuma. I like a man that makes me laugh. Especially when he’s got a maritime background.

These days Mrs Cramm, being past her prime, was more refined and less choosy. She liked them young, but not too young; tall, but not too tall; fair, but with a hint of dark, Otherwise she took them as they came. She kept her eyes skinned in towns like Phoenix because they were full of youngish, tallish, fair-to-darkish, hopelessly broke possibles.

So seeing Flapping Eagle quickened her pulse noticeably. The thrill of the chase had never palled on Livia Cramm. Yoicks, she thought.

– Hey you there with the big eyes, she called. Coo-eee.

Flapping Eagle stopped mooching idly down the street. The can he had been kicking came clattering to rest.

– Like a job?

– Doing what? Flapping Eagle tried not to show his eagerness.

– Oh, you know, earning money, shouted Mrs Cramm. Odd jobs. Stuff like that.

Flapping Eagle considered for about one second. He came up to her huge car.

– Ma’am, he said, where I come from, we have a saying. A live dog is better than a dead lion, but death is preferable to poverty.

– I can see, said Mrs Cramm, we’re going to have a fascinating relationship. I like a man with brains.

As the car swept them off, Flapping Eagle reflected that once again he was being ruled by an older woman. Hot on the heels of this thought came the notion that he didn’t mind. I was an adaptable sort of man, more a chameleon than an eagle, better at reaction than action. Whereas Mrs Cramm looked good for some action.

V La Femme-Crampon

FLAPPING EAGLE NEVER liked Nicholas Deggle. He couldn’t understand, for one thing, what he was to Livia Cramm. He appeared to do little more than the occasional conjuring trick and receive large sums of money-and the odd jewel-for doing it.

– Gifts, darling, was Mrs Cramm’s explanation. He’s a friend of mine and a genius what’s more. A real malin talent. Can’t I give my friends presents?

Nicholas Deggle never looked like a genius in Flapping Eagle’s eyes: except perhaps in that he had a genuine gift for accepting his benefactor’s munificence graciously. Nor, in his dark svelte finery, ring-laden and perfumed, with a rose in his buttonhole, did he look as if he needed the gifts.

Being absolved from the depredations of age, Flapping Eagle missed the key to Livia’s dependence on Deggle. As she aged, she became increasingly absorbed in the supernatural. She devoured the tarot, the scriptures, the cabbala, palmistry, anything and everything which held that the world was more than it seemed; that the physical end was not, in fact, the end. Since Deggle shared her interests and was a good deal more expert than she, Livia Cramm found him indispensable.

Deggle was in the habit of carrying around what he called his wand. This was an extraordinary object: cylindrical, some six inches long, slightly curving. The extraordinary thing was that it was made of solid stone. Flapping Eagle had never seen the like.

– Where did you find that? he once asked. Deggle looked at him quizzically and replied:

– It is the stem of a stone rose; I broke it off. Flapping Eagle felt foolish; by asking the question he had laid himself open to the ridicule of the answer.

The wand would be used in Deggle’s occasional displays of conjuring skill. He would stand, long-nosed and dark, in a black cloak, and conjure marvels from the air. Even Flapping Eagle was impressed at these displays, and disliked Deggle even more for impressing him. The conjurer never revealed his secrets, but they made Livia dote upon him.

Once, after such a display, Livia was eager to show off her own supernatural skills. She beckoned Flapping Eagle imperiously. -Come over here, she said, and let Livia read your darling hand.

Flapping Eagle approached suspiciously. Livia looked and squeezed and felt and prodded; and assumed an air of great gravity.

– Well, my Eagle, she said, What a terrible hand it is,

Flapping Eagle’s heart missed an involuntary beat.

– Are you sure you want to know? asked Mrs Cramm seriously.

Flapping Eagle thought: she makes it sound as though I have a choice. He looked into her eager eyes, glistening with their dread knowledge, and nodded.

Livia Cramm closed her eyes and intoned:

– You will live long and except for one serious illness be very healthy. The illness is an illness of the mind, but you will recover from it, though it may have a profound effect upon your career. You will neither marry nor father children. You will have no profession; nor do you have great talent. Your luck is bad. It is your lot to be led by others; in the end you will accept this. But most of all you are dangerous. You will bring grief and suffering and pain to those you know. Not intentionally; you are not malicious. But you are a bringer of ill winds. Where you walk, walks Death.

Flapping Eagle had to tense his muscles to prevent his hand from quivering. Without knowing about it, Livia Cramm had reiterated the curse of his birth and his given name.

She looked up and smiled as if to comfort him.

– But you are very attractive, she said in her usual voice.

Deggle smiled too.

Mrs Cramm’s dependence on Deggle grew unceasingly. Whenever Flapping Eagle made a suggestion, that they should sail here, or winter there, or even eat at such and such a place, it irked him to observe the slight questioning inclination of her head in Deggle’s direction before she delightedly agreed or gently demurred. There was no appeal from her decisions.

Two phrases usually formed the focal point of Flapping Eagle’s irritation. One was Livia Cramm’s. Whenever Deggle let drop some dark conversational flower from those saturnine lips, she would clap her hands excitedly, like a pubertal girl shown a naughty thing behind a rosebush, and exclaim (meticulously cultivated accent slipping in her transport) -Ain’t that the Deggle himself talkin’ to you. And she would look gleamingly pleased with the wickedness of the pun. At which Flapping Eagle clamped his mouth shut and stifled his thoughts.

The second phrase was Deggle’s own. He came and went his unknowable way, sauntering in and out of Mrs Cramm’s villa on the southern coast of Morispain, and every time he left, he would wave unsmilingly and say: -Ethiopia!

It was a complex and awful joke, arising from the archaic name of that closed, hidden, historical country (Abyssinia… I’ll be seeing you) and it drove Flapping Eagle out of his mind every time it was said. Ethiopia. Ethiopia. Ethiopia.

Deggle made Flapping Eagle wonder if he could bear his chosen fate.

He had been with Livia Cramm now, her personal gigolo, for twenty-five years. His reasoning was very simple: He had time, more than any in the universe but he had no money. She had a great deal of money and very little time. Thus, by sacrificing a small amount of his time he could very likely acquire a large amount of her cash. It was his most cynical decision, born of desperation, born from the future of dead possibilities that stared him in the face when Mrs Cramm had noticed him in Phoenix. He would have felt a great deal of guilt about it except for one thing: he did not like Livia Cramm.

Livia had been forty-five when she first met Flapping Eagle, and was then a ruined beauty of still-considerable sexual attraction and magnetism. Now, at seventy, the sexual attraction had gone. The magnetism had become an obnoxious, claustrophobic clinging. She clutched Flapping Eagle fiercely, as though she would never let go until he died on her as the unlamented Oscar Cramm had done so many years ago. In public her bony claws of hands never released him; in private she lay, her head eternally on his lap, gripping her own legs till her knuckles stood out whitely; in bed, she squeezed him with a strength so remarkable, it often left him winded. If she saw him speak to another woman she would descend upon them and in her cracked old tones deliver herself of a ringingly vulgar insult which sent the unfortunate female scurrying for shelter. Then she would apologize to Flapping Eagle, trying to look little-girl-coy (which was a sickening sight) and say: -I’m sorry, loveliest, did I spoil your fun then, did I?

There was no escape from Mrs Cramm.

Deggle had arrived on the scene comparatively recently: only eighteen months or so. This had made life even less supportable because Flapping Eagle was now no longer even the one who helped Livia decide the next step in her trivial, perpetually-dying life. He was just a symbol of her pulling power, male physical beauty incarnate, and thinking was no part of his duties. He was her refuge from the lonely blasts of antiquity.

– My Eagle never grows old, she would say proudly. Look at him: fifty-one (Flapping Eagle had lied to her about his age when they first met) and doesn’t look a day over thirty. Wonderful what good screwing can do.

Her politer acquaintances replied: -He’s not the only one, Livia. You’re incredible yourself, you know. Which had been the point of her comment. There were less and less of these acquaintances left.

Flapping Eagle’s only permitted source of regular human contact was, of course, Nicholas Deggle. And so cramped, so enclosed by the engulfing Mrs Cramm did he feel, that every so often he would make use of this source. He tried to tell himself that he treated Deggle as a social whore, in the same way as he was Livia’s sexual whore; but Deggle got the better of their exchanges too regularly to be so described.

Deggle reclined on a brocaded sofa.

– The issue is beyond doubt, he drawled. Livia Cramm is a monster.

Flapping Eagle said nothing.

– La Femme-Crammpon, said Deggle, and laughed, a shrill, falsetto noise.

– What?

– My dear Eagle, I’ve just realized. Do you know into whose clutches you have fallen? He was beside himself with laughter at his incomprehensible joke.

Flapping Eagle gave him his feed-line. -Go on. Tell me who it is.

– But my dear, c’est la Femme-Crampon! The clutching woman. Or, as you’d say, the Old Woman of the Sea! The Vieillarde herself!

He clutched his sides in agonies of mirth. (I sat ashen-faced and silent. There were times when Deggle frightened me.)

– It’s all true, he burst out between uncontrollable spasms. She’s old enough. She’s ugly enough. She lives for sea-travel. She picks up wandering youths like yourself, though you’re not as young as you look. And now she’s got you in her clutches, to squeeze and tighten and constrict until there’s no breath left in your body. Livia Cramm, the terror of voyagers! Why, she’s even taught you to love the sea to make it easier to rule you! Poor sailor, poor pretty-faced matelot that you are. You’re no more than a walking corpse with the Old Woman on your back, her legs gripping tightly, tightly, like the knot that tightens as you wrestle with it, tightly round your, ha ha, windpipe.

I wouldn’t even bother to struggle, he finished, wiping away the tears.

And this was another conversation with Nicholas Deggle:

– Have you ever wondered about old Oscar Cramm?

– Not really, said Flapping Eagle. He had had too many other things to wonder about.

– He never had a chance with that old man-eater, said Deggle. They say he passed on while making love to her, you know. I wonder if there were any bite-marks in his neck.

– Are you saying… began Flapping Eagle.

– Possibly I am, smiled Deggle. He wasn’t all that old, you know. Now if Livia were to think that you were getting on a bit yourself, she might begin to fancy a change.

– You have absolutely no reason… began Flapping Eagle, but Deggle interrupted again. It was quite remarkable how few of his sentences Flapping Eagle ever finished when in conversation with this dark smiler.

– I merely mean, said Deggle, that for some unknown reason I feel quite attached to you, I shouldn’t like to see you come to any harm, pretty-face.

After this conversation Flapping Eagle found himself watching Mrs Cramm; and when her legs constricted or her arms squeezed him, he remembered the passing of Oscar Cramm and became nervous. Which hampered his sexual duties on more than one occasion, and on these occasions he saw Livia Cramm frown thoughtfully and purse her lips before assuring him that it didn’t matter. She would sip from the jug of water that always sat by her bedside, surrounded by her army of pills, and turn away from him to sleep.

One night, Flapping Eagle had a curious dream. Livia Cramm had both her attenuated hands fixed vice-like around his throat and was pushing, pushing with her thumbs. He was sleeping in his dream and awoke in it to find his life being squeezed away. He wrestled then, wrestled for his life, and as he did so she changed continually into all manner of wet, stinking, shapeless, slippery things. He could not grip her and all the time her hold was tightening. Just before he fainted he forced out these words:

– You are old, Livia. Old hag. You’ll never find another.

All of a sudden (he could see nothing now: it was black inside his eyes) the hold relaxed. He heard Livia’s voice say: -Yes, my eagle, my soaring bird. Yes.

When he awoke, he found Livia Cramm dead as a stone, both hands fixed clawingly about her own neck. The jug of water was upset; her army of pills was substantially diminished.

It was only later that morning that Flapping Eagle discovered that his own precious bottle, the phial with the blue, release-giving liquid, had disappeared. He went to confront Deggle, who reclined as usual on the brocaded sofa in the drawing-room, his habitual dark clothing for once appropriate.

– Livia didn’t seem the sort to commit suicide, he said.

– What sort is that, foolish boy? asked Deggle. She was old.

– You don’t know about a certain bottle disappearing, do you? asked Flapping Eagle.

– You’re overwrought, said Deggle. I like you, you know. What you need, my boy, is to get away from all this. Take the yacht. Sail into the, ha ha, blue.

What can you say to a man who may or may not be a murderer, who may or may not have saved your life?

– You really are remarkably well-preserved, smiled Deggle. You must have a guardian angel.

Flapping Eagle thought: Or devil

The will left me the money but it left Deggle the yacht. The verdict was suicide.

Since Deggle didn’t want the yacht, and since I wanted desperately to get away, I accepted his offer and set sail, alone for the first time in a quarter of a century, for ports unknown.

VI Voyages

He was the leopard who changed his spots, he was the worm that turned. He was the shifting sands and the ebbing tide. He was moody as the sky, circular as the seasons, nameless as glass. He was Chameleon, changeling, all things to all men and nothing to any man. He had become his enemies and eaten his friends. He was all of them and none of them.

He was the eagle, prince of birds; and he was also the albatross. She clung round his neck and died, and the mariner became the albatross.

Having little option, he survived, wheeling his craft from shore to unsung shore, earning his keep, filling the empty hours of the hollow days of the vacant years. Contentment without contents, achievement without goal, these were the paradoxes that swallowed him.

He saw things most men miss in a mere lifetime. He saw:

A beach on which a maiden had been staked out, naked, as giant ants moved up her thighs towards their goal; he heard her screams and sailed on by.

A man rehearsing voices on a cliff top: high whining voices, low gravelly voices, subtle insinuating voices, raucous strident voices, voices honeyed with pain, voices glinting with laughter, the voices of the birds and of the fishes. He asked the man what he was doing (as he sailed by). The man called back-and each word was the word of a different being: -I am looking for a suitable voice to speak in. As he called, he leaned forward, lost his balance and fell. The cry was in a single voice; but the rocks on the shore cut it and shredded it for him again.

A beggar shaking with starvation on a raft, and the fish that leapt from the ocean into his begging bowl and died for him.

Whales making love.

And many other things; but nowhere in the seas, for all the solace of the waters, for all the wonders beyond the curved liquid horizon, could he see or sniff or feel his own death.

Death: a blue fluid, blue like the sea, vanished down a monster’s throat. All that remained was to survive. Stripped of his past, forsaking the language of his ancestors for the languages of the archipelagoes of the world, forsaking the ways of his ancestors for those of the places he drifted to, forsaking any hope of ideals in the face of the changing and contradicting ideals he encountered, he lived, doing what he was given to do, thinking what he was instructed to think, being what it was most desirable to be, hoping only for what was permitted, and doing it so skilfully, with such natural aptitude, that the men he encountered thought he was thus of his own free will and liked him for it. He loved many women-being so easily able to adapt to the needs and pleasures of any woman.

Several times he changed the name he gave to people. His face was such, his skin was such, that in many places he could pass for local; and pass he did, using what had once been his curse to his advantage. The change of name was necessary, if his immortality was not to be noticed. This immortality kept him moving, too: always seeking out places where he was unknown or forgotten.

For a tyrant, he slew rebels; in a free state, he denounced tyranny.

Among carnivores, he praised the strength-giving virtues

of animal flesh; among vegetarians he spoke of the spiritual purity that abstinence from such flesh brought; among cannibals, he devoured a companion.

Though he was kind by nature, he worked for a time as an executioner, perfecting the arts of axe and knife. Though he believed himself to be good, he betrayed many women. Few left him: he always moved on first.

And after a while, he realized he had learnt nothing at all. The many, many experiences, the multitude of people and the myriad crimes had left him empty; a grin without a face. He was no more now than a nod of agreement, a bow of acquiescence.

His body continued to keep itself perfectly; his mind never grew dimmer. He lived the same physiological day over and over again. His body: an empire on which there was no sun to set.

One day, afloat and nowhere, he said aloud:

– I want to grow old. Not to die: to grow old.

A gull screeched its ridicule.

Flapping Eagle began his search for Sispy and Bird-Dog as methodically as he could. He sailed back to Amerindia and made his way inland to Axona and Phoenix, where the whole cold trail began. But that led him nowhere. Sispy and Bird-Dog didn’t seem to have travelled anywhere at all. They had simply vanished.

– Sispy? said people in Phoenix. That some kind of a pree-vert foreign name?

After that, Flapping Eagle gave up any pretence of method. He sailed on through seas, channels, rivers, lakes, oceans, wherever his craft took him, asking, wherever he stopped, if anyone knew of the pedlar, or his sister.

He knew it was almost certainly hopeless; they might be anywhere on the globe; they might use different names; they might have drowned, or died some other violent death; they might no longer be together.

Only two things kept him going: the first was the knowledge that only Sispy would know if there was a way, not of dying, but of restoring his body to the normal, vulnerable state of human bodies: to allow him to grow old.

The second was the message Sispy had sent him through Bird-Dog on his first appearance:

Tell your brother Born-From-Dead that all eagles come at last to eyrie and all sailors come at last to shore.

Sispy had said that before Joe-Sue had even become Flapping Eagle; and years before he had any notion of going to sea. Perhaps, thought Flapping Eagle, sailor, Sispy divined something of my future.

It wasn’t much grounds for optimism, but it was something.

He remembered another sentence of Sispy’s: For those who will not use the blue there is only one place I know of.

Flapping Eagle told himself firmly, over and over again: there is such a place; it’s only a matter of time before you find it; and You’ll know when you do, because its inhabitants will be like you. Young or old, they cannot disguise their eyes from me. Eyes like mine, which have seen everything and know nothing. The eyes of the survivor.

But the years passed. And more years. And more years.

Flapping Eagle was beginning to wonder if he was sane. Perhaps there never was a Sispy, never a Bird-Dog or Sham-Man or Phoenix: perhaps not even a Livia Cramm or a Deggle. Yes. Madness explained everything. He was mad.

So when his boat sailed into its home port, the port of X on the Moorish coast of Morispain, his eyes were glazed and distant.

He was contemplating killing himself.

VII The Gate

NICHOLAS DEGGLE SAT on a bollard on the jetty, long and black, with an inordinately wicked smile playing about his lips.

– I trust you had a nice sail, pretty-face, he said. Wind all right? Not too high? Not too low? I’m afraid I’m not an expert in these matters.

Flapping Eagle raised his head slowly. Now he knew he was mad.

– Deggle, he said.

– The same. None other. Accept no substitute, said Deggle. But a word in your shell-like orifice: I’m not called by that name any more. Time flies, you know, and names with it.

– Yes, said Flapping Eagle, bemused.

– I’m called Lokki, actually. The Great Lokki at your service. Phenomenal Pheats of Prestidigitation Phantastically Performed. Dear me, how one does fall upon hard times. Straitened circumstances. I’ve become my own descendant, as a matter of fact, or my own ancestor, depending on your historical perspective. The legal problems were enormous. Anyway, I’ve been careful to keep leaving myself my own boat, so thank you for returning it.

– Not at all, mouthed Flapping Eagle.

– Lokki, said Deggle, rolling the L. It’s a good name, don’t you think? Echoes of the old Norse and so forth. Gives one’s act a kind of artistic respectability. Shame about Livia, wasn’t it? I’m sure you did the right thing, going off like that. It must have been a great shock for you, all that money at once. You’re quite better now, I hope?

The eyes.

Deggle’s eyes: the eyes of the survivor, filled with an ageless twinkle.

– Deggle, if you…

Deggle was still a master of interruption. He waved a ringed hand.

– Please, my dear. I did tell you. Do call me Lokki. People might hear.

– Lokki. If you’re still here after all this time, you must know about Sispy.

Deggle cocked his head and looked puzzled.

– Sispy, he mused, Siss-pee. What is it, old eagle? Soup? It sounds awfully familiar.

– You know very well. Sispy. Sispy the pedlar. With the bottles, Lokki. The blue bottle. You remember Livia.

Flapping Eagle tried to make it sound like a threat, but Deggle laughed happily.

– Mmm, he said. Of course, Livia-by which I take it you mean Mrs Livia Cramm, widow of Oscar Cramm, the tin-tack king-has been dead for such a very long time. Long before my time, of course. Now if only my illustrious ancestor Nicholas Deggle were still alive, I’m sure he’d know exactly what you mean.

He smiled beautifully. Like the Deggle himself, Flapping Eagle remembered.

– Now, he said, may I offer you a drink?

The Great Lokki lived in a caravan just outside X. There was a horse between the shafts and an extremely beautiful and very stupid conjurer’s assistant between the sheets.

– Lotti, explained Deggle, looking embarrassed. Lokki and Lotti, you see.

Frustration was building within Flapping Eagle, the frustration of centuries.

– Deggle, he said, ignoring the Great Lokki’s anguished protest, I think it’s time you stopped trying to make a fool of me.

– But my dear, said Deggle and his eyes were not twinkling, that’s so easy.

Flapping Eagle was on the verge of committing an act of physical violence when, abruptly, Deggle said: -Piss off, Lotti. His language seemed to have acquired occasional lapses, its quality reduced to suit his reduced way of life. There couldn’t have been a Livia Cramm for a very long time. At any rate, Lotti pissed off outside to chat to the horse, which was therefore able to feel intellectually superior to at least one human being.

Deggle said: -I think you’re just about ready for Calf Island.

Flapping Eagle didn’t entirely understand or believe what Deggle told him, about “making a gate” to the island. It had apparently taken centuries of trying, and even now might be dangerous. But despite his bewilderment, he didn’t care. This was undoubtedly the haven of which Sispy had spoken, so it was undoubtedly the place for which he was destined.

Mrs Cramm had said it was his lot to be led; and he was filled with something approaching hate for Sispy, who had distorted his entire life in one casual stroke so very long ago. He found himself wanting not only his freedom from the chains of immortality, but some kind of satisfaction as well.

He went for a walk alone the next morning, in the hills above X. He was saying goodbye to the world, since, if half of what Deggle had said was true, there was a good chance he would never see it again.

In the afternoon he went down to the jetty and prepared the boat for departure. Deggle still disclaimed any need for it.

In the evening, Deggle and Lotti came to see him off. -The evening is the best time to try and get through, Deggle had said. They waved.

– Deggle, Flapping Eagle said as he pushed off, I’d love to know what motivates you.

– Oh, well, shrugged the wickedly-smiling conjurer, perhaps I don’t like your friend Sispy very much either. But then, perhaps I do.

– Byeee, squeaked Lotti.

– Ethiopia, said Deggle.

Flapping Eagle no longer knew whether he was mad, whether he had accepted Deggle’s story so unquestioningly, been so willing to follow his instructions despite the warnings of physical danger, just as an excuse for doing away with himself. He was, he told himself, doing the only thing he could do.

– They go there, Deggle had said, from choice, because they chose immortality. Whereas you are after something quite different: old age. Physical decay. And, presumably, death. You should set the cat among the pigeons, pretty-face. Not to mention old Livia’s prophecy.

The Deggle giggle lasted for a long while after that.

The Mediterranean was calm, dark and calm. No wind. A clear sky. Stars. Flapping Eagle dozed for a moment. When he awoke, it was to feel a gale rushing at his face, a cloud rushing over his head, a crackle of electricity in the air. He was standing erect now, fighting to keep his craft from breaking under the force of the holocaust, when quite unaccountably dizziness swept over him and he fell from his yacht, Deggle’s yacht, into the angry sea. The last thing he heard was a loud drumming noise… like the beating of mighty wings.

A few seconds later he fell through the hole in the Mediterranean into that other sea, that not-quite-Mediterranean, and was carried towards the misty beach in the first light of dawn as Mr Virgil Jones rocked in his chair.

When Flapping Eagle arrived at Calf Island his body was thirty-four years, three months and four days old. He had lived for a total of seven hundred and seventy-seven years, seven months and seven days. By a swift calculation, we see that he had stopped ageing seven hundred and forty-three years, four months and three days ago.

He was a tired man.

VIII

– INTRODUCTIONS WOULD BE proper, said Virgil Jones, at a time like the present. Would you care for a nice steaming bowl of Mrs O’Toole’s very own root-tea, as it is the hour? Never let it be said the decencies were not observed in the Maison O’Toole.

– I’m wearing a frock, said Flapping Eagle in astonishment.

– Certainly you are, certainly, said Virgil Jones. Allow me to explain. Always a rational explanation, as they say, or, that is to say, as they said.

– Please do, said Flapping Eagle, feeling his throbbing head.

– Ah yes, said Virgil Jones, the head. I expect it hurts, not entirely unexpectedly, if I might be momentarily tautologous. Half-drowned heads have a way of protesting, you might even say bellyaching, although obviously we are not speaking of your belly. You have, sir, my unrestrained sympathy and the offer of root-tea. Mrs O’Toole swears by the arrowroot for such malaises. It flies straight and true to the heart of the affliction and thunk! one is cured.

– About the frock, said Flapping Eagle, raising himself from the prone position until he was jack-knifed, legs lying along the rush mat, torso and head leaning upwards into the room inquiringly, supported on a rubbery arm.

– Now, now, said Mr Jones, if I were you I wouldn’t attempt the vertical just yet. The horizontal is a far more suitable position for recuperation. I have often wondered if those tragic cases of people buried alive did not spring from this: the horizontal helping them to recover, you understand. Possibly one should be buried standing up, if You’ll excuse the brief foray into necrology. Merely a small pleasantry, no morbidity intended, nor I hope taken.

– The frock, said Flapping Eagle.

– O, my sincere apologies, said Virgil Jones, if it seems I was ducking your inquiry. Far from it, sir, far from it. Nothing could give me greater pleasure than to elucidate the matter of the frock. The fact of the matter is one’s conversational partners have been rather limited of late and the opportunity is well-nigh irresistible. The affair of the frock is a trifle. Merely that when we fished you from the sea your garments were a little moist, not to say damp, not to say positively sodden. And the fact of the matter is my own wardrobe is somewhat limited; so on the whole we thought it best, if you take my meaning, to employ one of Mrs O’Toole’s garments. You have our unreserved apologies if it brings you any embarrassment, but I assure you all proper decencies were observed, Mrs O’Toole leaving the room during the process of disinvestiture.

– I’m sure they were, said Flapping Eagle, trying to put the voluble, excited man at his ease; and, remembering his manners, went on: I owe you my thanks, sir, for saving my life. My name is Flapping Eagle.

– Virgil Beauvoir Chanakya Jones at your service, said Mr Jones, approximating a bow from the waist, which he did with some difficulty, there being so much of his own flesh to impede him. -Mrs O’Toole will be here presently, he confided. She is at the beach retrieving my rocking-chair, which she was unable to carry back with us, owing to having yourself strapped across her shoulders.

Flapping Eagle must have failed to conceal his puzzlement, for Mr Jones added hastily: -As you will observe, I am sitting down. Were I to stand, you would see why I am unable to carry the chair myself. My belt, you follow. It serves as a strap; but tragically, when doing so, the efficiency of my trousers is somewhat impaired.

It didn’t sound like a very good explanation, but then it was none of Flapping Eagle’s business. -Quite so, he said, and noticed in himself, not for the first time, a tendency to adopt the speaking style and speech patterns of others.

His head reminded him of its existence; he lay back on the mat. -I think I would like that root-tea, he said.

Mr Jones stood up laboriously, clutching at his trousers. He moved across the room, blinking in the direction of the fireplace, where a small pot hung above the winking embers. -Keeps it warm, he said; then added: Damnation. He had just knocked over a low, rickety table. The pieces of a large jigsaw puzzle dispersed themselves informally around the accident.

– Fornication, Mr Jones swore further. It was a black day for mankind when my glasses broke. Your pardon for my foulmouthed speech, Mr Eagle; one’s bodily inadequacies are a constant affliction, are they not?

– You do jigsaw puzzles, then.

– Do them? Mr Eagle, I construct them. In these solitary years they have provided my one stimulation. One day, I expect, I shall be some good at the things. At the moment my skill in construction far surpasses my talents at reconstruction. And myopia does nothing to assist. O for a qualified grinder of lenses.

He poured out a bowl of root-tea and carried it back, nearly slipping on the scattered jigsaw, and sat down by Flapping Eagle once more.

How unlikely, thought Flapping Eagle, that surroundings as meagre as these should exude so comfortable, so friendly an atmosphere. The room in which he lay was little more than the interior of a hovel; two rush mats some distance apart, one of which currently bore his weakened frame, lying on a dirt floor-although it was a meticulously swept floor. The broom, a bundle of twigs, rested indolently against a wall. The walls were logs covered in caked mud, the roof as well. A fireplace and the upturned rickety low table. A few pots. In a far corner, an old trunk. Nothing on the walls; no decoration anywhere. It was as distant from the sumptuous residence of, say, Livia Cramm as was China. And yet it was friendly.

Noises off: the twitterings of birds. A rustle of thick shrubbery. The occasional distant howl of a wild dog. No footsteps, no concourse of humanity. One window, with a piece of sacking drawn across it, flapping in the breeze; one door, covered in the same manner. It was the dwelling of a savage, or a castaway. Virgil Jones fitted into it about as easily as an elephant in a pepperpot.

He sat solicitously on the floor, wearing a dark and aged suit. There was a bowler hat upon his head and a gold chain traversed his waistcoat. (There was no gold watch at the end of it.) Somehow, thought Flapping Eagle, in these unsavoury surroundings, he preserves an air of dignity. Short-sighted, clumsy, loquacious, large-tongued, slobbering dignity, the injured hauteur of the impoverished. He reminded Flapping Eagle of an old railway engine he had once seen, a giant of steam in its day, rusting in a siding. The form of power denied its content. A stranded hulk. Puffing Billy. Flapping Eagle finished his root-tea, put the bowl down and fell fast asleep.

– That’s right, murmured Virgil Jones. Build your strength.

The birds sang their agreement from the trees.

When he awoke it was to find a different face staring down at him: the crinkled monkey folds of Dolores O’Toole’s physiognomy. At first he leapt in alarm, but then as wakefulness came subsided again, realizing that what he had taken for a snarl of hate was in fact a smile. Dolores O’Toole was the ugliest woman he had ever seen.

He gathered himself. -May I ask an obvious question, he said. Where am I?

– That’s a good question, approved Virgil Jones.

– Among friends, soothed Dolores O’Toole, snarling her sympathy.

Flapping Eagle felt highly confused.

IX Under Calf Mountain

– YOU ARE AT the foot of a mountain, said Virgil Jones. This is Calf Island, and the mountain is Calf Mountain. The mountain is really the whole island.

– Are you alone here? asked Flapping Eagle.

– Here, yes. Yes, here we are alone. Relatively speaking, said Virgil Jones. There are the birds, of course, and the chickens, and a few harmless wild animals.

– Do you mean there are no other human beings on the island at all?

– O, said Virgil Jones, no, I can’t truthfully say that.

– No, agreed Dolores, not truthfully.

Flapping Eagle had the distinct impression that they spoke with reluctance.

– Where are they then? he pressed.

– Ah, said Virgil.

– A long distance away, said Dolores.

Flapping Eagle’s head hurt; he felt ill. Scarcely strong enough to force information out of the lip-biting pair.

– Please, he said, tell me where.

Virgil Jones appeared to make a decision. -The slopes of the mountain, he said, are mainly covered in forestation. I believe there are a few people wandering around in the woods, but we rather keep ourselves to ourselves, so I couldn’t truthfully say where.

– And that’s all? asked Flapping Eagle.

– N… n… no, admitted Virgil.

– There are others, yielded Dolores.

– Are you going to tell me about them? asked Flapping Eagle, his skull giving a fair impression of splintering into a million tiny shards.

– O, you don’t want to know about them, said Virgil Jones hopefully.

– They are completely uninteresting, assured Dolores.

Flapping Eagle closed his eyes.

– Please, he said.

– He asks so politely, said Dolores despairingly.

So they told him.

From Dolores, he learned that K was a town of reprobates and degraded types; selfish, decadent people that no decent woman would want to be near; but then Flapping Eagle was no decent woman. From Virgil Jones he learned what he had hoped to learn. This was the place Sispy had spoken of. An island of immortals who had found their longevity too burdensome in the outside world, yet had been unwilling to give it up; with Sispy’s guidance they had come to Calf Mountain to be with their own kind.

– Does the name Bird-Dog mean anything to you? he asked.

– Bird-Dog, said Virgil Jones. (Was that alarm or concentration on his face?) Is the lady a friend of yours?

– My sister, said Flapping Eagle.

– No, said Virgil Jones. No, it doesn’t.

Later that night Flapping Eagle suddenly realized it must have been a lie. How had Mr Jones known the name Bird-Dog was a woman’s name?

And more importantly: why had he denied knowing her?

He pressed the point the next morning.

– My dear Mr Eagle, said Virgil Jones, I feel very strongly you should bend all your energies to the recovery of your health. You have been greatly weakened by your misadventure. When you are well, you have my word that Mrs O’Toole and I will answer all your questions. It’s a complex matter; I would be happier if you were in as fit a condition as possible.

– All I want, said Flapping Eagle, is an answer to one question: are my sister and Mr Sispy on this island? The answer to that will not strain my health, I assure you.

– Very well, sighed Mr Jones, the answer is Yes; yes, they are. After a fashion. And now I’ll say no more. Do get well soon, dear Mr Eagle.

Flapping Eagle let the subject drop and drank another bowl of root-tea.

Dolores O’Toole had hobbled off to collect fruits and berries. Virgil sat by Flapping Eagle’s bedside watching with ill-concealed jealousy as the convalescent man worked at the jigsaw puzzle.

– You astonish me with your skill, he said, with as good grace as he could muster.

– Beginners’ luck, disclaimed Flapping Eagle. He really was doing very well.

– Dolores and I are very anxious to hear all about you, now that you’re so much better. You must have had quite a time on your way here. But upon consideration perhaps it would be polite if I told you a little about ourselves first, so as to put you at your ease. If you’d like to hear about us, that is.

– Please, said Flapping Eagle and fitted three more pieces into the puzzle.

Virgil Jones frowned. -I think that one goes at the top, he said, a shade abruptly. Flapping Eagle tried; it didn’t.

– O, I see, said Flapping Eagle; it fits here. The piece slid into place at the bottom of the puzzle.

– I always wanted to be an archaeologist, you know, said Virgil Jones, changing the subject. Unfortunately life has a way of sidetracking one’s greatest ambitions. Painters, would-be artists, end up whitewashing walls. Sculptors are forced to design toilets. Writers become critics or publicists. Archaeologists, like myself, can become gravediggers.

– You were a gravedigger? asked Flapping Eagle in genuine surprise. But it fitted: Mr Jones’ habitual lugubrious expression went well with that profession.

– For a time, said Mr Jones. For a time. Before events conspired to bring me here. It was pleasant enough work; the most pleasing aspect being that everyone one met was happy. The corpses were content enough, and so, usually, were the mourners. It was a source of lasting comfort to me, the sight of so many tears of joy, so freely shed,

– That’s a very cynical statement, said Flapping Eagle.

– Alas, poor Yorick, said Virgil Jones; the worms long ago gnawed his romanticism to shreds.

In the ensuing silence, Flapping Eagle fitted together all but three of the remaining pieces.

– There’s not much for a gravedigger to do on Calf Mountain, said Virgil Jones; so I have retired into my true love-contemplation.

– And Dolores? asked Flapping Eagle.

– Ah, Dolores; there is a sad tale. To love life so much under such a physical burden… it is my belief she lives alone, or, that is to say, with me, because she finds she can only love human beings in their absence.

– This last piece, said Flapping Eagle, doesn’t fit.

Virgil Jones smiled in satisfaction. -That’s my little joke, he said. The jigsaw cannot be completed.

X Birds

AS VIRGIL JONES and Dolores O’Toole prepared the evening meal, Flapping Eagle could not help observe what a good team they made in their distorted way. They seemed to work at different planes of the room-Dolores low and stooping, Virgil gross but erect. For a moment Flapping Eagle had the illusion that they actually stood at different ground levels. Then it passed, and he smiled. Despite their secrecy, their unwillingness to talk about the island, he could not help liking them. He wondered if they made love.

He had told them his own story earlier in the afternoon; they had listened with the rapt silence of children, nodding and gasping. Mr Jones had spoken only once, when Flapping Eagle first mentioned Nicholas Deggle. Then the eyebrows had lifted high into the fleshy forehead and Mr Jones had said: -So, so. When he finished, they sat in respectful silence for a moment; then Virgil Jones had said:

– By the heavens, Mr Eagle, you do seem to have led a rather epic life. I’m afraid we can offer you no stories to match yours. We live wholly in the microcosm, you see; the state of my corns and the state of nations are to me of equal concern. I don’t want at all to preach but I would recommend that you adapt yourself to minutiae; they are so much less confusing.

– There is the end of my search to be achieved, said Flapping Eagle.

– I’m afraid, to be honest, said Virgil Jones apologetically, I’ve ceased to see the merit in achievement or heroism. One tries by one’s life and actions to bring a little sense into an inane universe; to attempt more is to be sucked into the whirlpool.

Flapping Eagle thought: they seem very anxious for me to abandon my intentions. But he thought he had heard a subsidiary note in Virgil Jones’ voice: a note of uncertainty. Perhaps he didn’t quite believe what he was saying. He also thought Dolores O’Toole was the more tense of the two; and when he had spoken of his desire to continue his search, her glance had not been wholly neighbourly.

– Concentrate on the here, Mr Eagle, that’s my advice to you, finished Virgil Jones. Don’t worry about the there. Or the past. Or the future. Worry about dinner and your corns. Those are things you can affect.

– You said you would answer my questions when I was well, said Flapping Eagle. I am well now.

– Tomorrow morning, said Dolores hastily. After a good night’s sleep.

– There’s no time like the present, said Flapping Eagle.

– Tomorrow, pleaded Dolores O’Toole.

Flapping Eagle drew a breath.

– Since I am living on your kindness, he said, I am naturally at your mercy. Tomorrow will be quite soon enough.

Virgil Jones assumed a hearty air. -Let us celebrate your recovery, he said. I think we might slay a chicken tonight. In fact, Mr Eagle, since the peeling and so forth of vegetables rather preoccupies Mrs O’Toole and myself at present, perhaps you would be so kind?

Flapping Eagle could not very well refuse; he took the proffered knife and went out into the yard. It struck him that this was his first conscious sally into Calf Island.

When he was outside, Dolores came hesitantly to stand by Mr Jones’ side.

– You won’t… you won’t go with him? Her eyes were filled with fear.

Virgil Jones silently took her hand; she squeezed it violently. It was, for both of them, an irreversible declaration, forced at last from an eternity of concealment.

– I could not bear to lose you, she said.

Flapping Eagle looked up at Calf Mountain in the failing light. It climbed steeply away into lost forests, forbidding, green, which cleared somewhere up there to make room for the town of K. Calf Mountain: as alien to him as it was to the world he had known; and yet there was a similarity: a likeness of self and mountain, of mist-isolated island and much-travelled continents. It was there in the gloom and he couldn’t see it. Just the faces of his sister and the unknown pedlar in the darkness, waiting to be found, or forgotten.

– Chicken, he said to the chicken, shall I kill you?

The knife was in his hand, and the fowl at his mercy; but he hesitated, an old conflict reopening within him. He had never been an outsider by choice, and the desire to be acceptable, to please, which he knew to be within him, created a warring sensation inside. If only for this reason, he would not mind, in some ways, if he did stay awhile with Mr Jones and Mrs O’Toole. It would give pleasure, perhaps; it would, for once, unite him with other human beings, a welcome change from his accustomed separate-ness. And it would be peaceful. But to give up his search altogether…

He killed the chicken, because it was there to be killed.

Dinner was a silent meal for long stretches. Dolores O’Toole was lost in nervous broodings; she would snap out of the reverie to offer Mr Jones and Flapping Eagle further helpings of chicken. Flapping Eagle saw in her eyes a new light; he didn’t know what it meant, but it was new. He himself was preoccupied with the mountain, cloud-topped and unknown.

Virgil Jones made fitful attempts at conversation.

– Would you agree, Mr Eagle, he said, that what the human race fears most is the workings of its own mind?

– Yes and no, said Flapping Eagle distantly. Mr Jones frowned; he knew he should find a less serious topic, but none presented itself in the candle-lit murkiness. They squatted around the rickety, low table, Flapping Eagle once again unfrocked, Virgil hatless, and thought their separate thoughts.

– The mountain is really irresistible at this time of evening, offered Virgil Jones, and received only a few syllables in reply.

– Yes, yes it is, said Flapping Eagle, and was rewarded with a fierce glare from Mrs O’Toole.

– You cannot have failed to hear the birds, Mr Jones tried again. They are legion. Has it ever struck you how often one uses birds as analogies of human attributes and behaviour?

– No, said Flapping Eagle.

– Ah. Consider. The bird-kingdom is remarkably suitable for myth-makers. It occupies a different medium, yet it is in many ways an excellent parallel-having languages, courtship, family ties and so forth. Distant enough in appearance to he a safely abstract analogue, birds are near enough to be interesting. Consider the lark. Or the hawk. Or the nightingale. Or the vulture. The names are more than descriptions; they have become symbols. Consider, too, the profusion of bird-gods in Antiquity. The Phoenix. The Roc. The Homa. The Garuda. The Bennu. The Bar Yuchre. The Hathilinga with the strength of five elephants. The Kerkes. The Gryphon. The Norka. The Sacred Dragon. The Pheng. The Kirni. The Orosch. The Saëna. The Anqa. And of course, the master of them all, Simurg himself. Quite a number. Quite a number.

There was no reply.

– If I am not very much mistaken, Mr Eagle, Mr Jones added, the Eagle has an interesting significance in Amerindian mythology. Am I not right in saying that it is the symbol of the Destroyer? Its destruction being terrible and swift. I was fascinated by your choice of the name.

– I did not choose the name, said Flapping Eagle. It chose me.

– Quite, said Virgil Jones, and crossed his fingers.

XI Hump

MIDNIGHT, OR THEREABOUTS. In the small house in the small clearing by the grey cliffs above the grey beach, silence. In the dark forests on the dark slopes of the magic mountain, silence. Even the sea and sky were hushed.

Flapping Eagle was asleep; but the worried, ugly woman on the mat across the floor was wide awake.

Virgil Jones sat, an ample mound of flesh partly-concealed by a less-than-simple blanket, in his rocking-chair. Its irregular movements betrayed that he, too, was some way from dreams. His eyes closed for a moment; when, inexorably, they inched open again, he saw that Dolores stood in front of him, a bent body in a crude shift, spindleshanked and shaking slightly. The invitation in her eyes was unmistakable. They remained thus for a long instant, obesity and attenuation linked by the naked expression of desire. Then Virgil’s mouth twitched briefly in an unconvincing attempt at a smile; and he hauled himself from the chair, his nerves crying outrage in his tired frame. He walked to the door and drew back the sackcloth, standing with stiff gallantry as Mrs O’Toole hobbled out.

In the clearing, amid the sleeping chickens, they came to a halt again, uncertainty paralysing their half-willing limbs. Virgil’s tongue licked its outsize way around his lips; Dolores O’Toole’s hands fluttered limply at her sides, like a sparrow with a broken wing.

– Virgil.

His name floated discreetly across the paralysis; Dolores had voiced it with the care of a woman revealing a secret treasure. It lanced its way into him through the old nightshirt, and abruptly he felt less ridiculous.

– O, Virgil.

A second call; his eyes moved until they were looking at Dolores’ eyes, and saw the shine. He found himself full of the charm of those eyes, so alive, so fond.

– Madam, he said, as fright coursed once more through his body, Madam, I fear I may not be…

– Dolores, she said. Not Madam. Dolores.

He opened his mouth; the name emerged to cleanse him.

– Dolores, he said.

– Virgil.

And again the hiatus; now it was the woman who waited upon the man, unwilling to move further without his support.

Virgil Jones thought: We are like two frightened, ugly virgins. He found the power of his limbs returning and moved the few steps to Dolores’ side.

– My arm, he offered. She made a brief bob.

– I thank you, sir, she said, and took it.

– This way, I think, said Virgil Jones; there is a soft hollow of grass adjacent to the well.

She inclined her head in agreement. They walked to the edge of the clearing in a formal, deliberate gait, and then the trees moved around them.

Virgil Jones sat down heavily in the hollow, exhaling air in a gush. He was at a loss to know what Dolores might do now, and equally at a loss in himself. Alas, poor Yorick.

Dolores remained standing, her eyes fixed upon him in a glassy, cocked glance; her hands moved slowly to her shoulders, where rough bows held her shift in place. Something near panic flooded through Virgil as he realized their purpose; but she was fixed now, determination set in her chin. The hands reached their goal and tugged; the shift fell.

– It is a warm night, thankfully, essayed Mr Jones. The mist is all but cleared. The words sounded idiotic as he said them, but Dolores showed no sign of disapproval, standing before him shyly, one hand half-accidentally poised at the joining of her thighs. In the dark, she semed less wrinkled, her hunched body less broken.

Virgil extended an arm, and she came to him, jerking her way to the ground, to lie motionless, yet expectant.

He kissed her.

Their hands were slow at first, slow and unsure, learning once more the touches of skin and skin, weaving inelegant patterns upon the fellow-bodies. But slowly they found their purpose, kneading away the knots of tension in necks and shoulders and backs, finding a natural rhythm, glad hands.

So now the hands remembered, and the lips, lips feverishly seeking each other out, parting and joining, tongues twisting in the elation of rediscovery.

– Not bad for a pair of youngsters, said Virgil Jones, and Dolores O’Toole laughed. It was so long since he had heard her laugh; it was to him a delightful thing, and he laughed too.

It was the laughter that did it; the floodgates opened and drowned their hesitations. Their bodies assaulted each other.

Dolores cried out at some time: -My hump! Hold my hump!

And Virgil’s hands had grasped the forbidden deformity, to stroke and scratch and grasp; she shuddered with the pleasure of it, of feeling disfiguration transmute into sexuality.

She lay beside him for a moment; then sprang up to straddle him, her hands grasping great folds of his flesh, to squeeze and twist them in a child’s delight. Again they laughed; Virgil, too, was freed from the disadvantages of his shape. -It’s like making bread, she giggled, pretending to work his belly into a loaf.

He came only once, and she not at all. All organs atrophy through disuse. But their limitations were important to neither of them; their achievement was what concerned and satisfied them. For a long time he simply lay over her, spilling over her on both sides, enveloping her in himself, feeling her bones, hard and near the surface of her as they lay covered in his flesh, and they were one beast, four-handed, four-legged, two-headed and wreathed in a smile.

Her breasts were as small as pendulous dried figs, while his were as fleshy as watermelons. His penis lay short and fat in the hard hollow of her hand.

– Don’t be thin, she said. Don’t ever be thin. Stay fat. Stay Virgil.

– I scarcely have any option, he replied, having a Condition as I do. The thyroid gland does not respond to dieting.

– Good, she said.

– By the same token, said Virgil Jones, I couldn’t imagine you being overweight.

– Nothing will change, she said. We shall still sit upon the beach and feed the chickens and listen to the birds and dust the house and…

The expression on his face stopped her.

– Virgil, she cried. Nothing will change I Nothing!

The expression on his face did not change.

Perhaps it was wrong to lie with him. Now I have given him what he wanted. Now I have nothing for him, nothing held back, nothing to hold him.

Perhaps it was wrong to lie with her. Another duty, another obligation, another potential source of guilt. Was I lying to her in lying with her?

Perhaps it was right to lie with him. Now there is no secrecy, all of it out in the open and fixed and unchanging. Now he will know that he loves me.

Perhaps it was right to lie with her…

– I love you, said Dolores O’Toole.

– I love you, said Virgil Jones.

They both felt very, very sad.

– It was him, said Dolores fiercely.

– Who?

– Flapping Eagle, she said. If he were not here, we would not be. Here.

– We have much to thank him for, then, said Virgil Jones.

– Yes, said Dolores, unhappily. We have everything to thank him for.

But the risk of grief, thought Virgil, and the risk of guilt: could one not lay that, very properly, at the door of Grimus?

Dolores stared at the mountain with a possessed intensity.

– Nothing will change, she said, between clenched teeth.

XII The Tremor

IT WAS THE tremor that woke Flapping Eagle early. It shook at him through the thin mat; it upset the room’s single low table to send the jigsaw crashing. He came awake fast, and leapt to his feet at the same instant; but it was over, too slight to cause any damage.

He had been dreaming: a nightmare. He stood on a black rock, in full warpaint, clutching a tomahawk, slashing vainly at the eagle that swooped endlessly down at him, scarring his body, biting at his flesh, while on the ground below stood a faceless figure, long and black and very smooth, with jewelled rings on every finger, laughing and laughing and laughing: the laugh of Deggle.

The room was still dark, sackcloth barring the first faint light. He stood gulping breath for a nervous instant, and saw that Dolores O’Toole’s mat was unused, and Virgil Jones’ rocking-chair was rocking emptily. He went outside.

Mr Jones and Mrs O’Toole stood in the clearing; chickens squawked with alarm and birds screeched, interrupted in their sleep. The ill-assorted pair stood still. Virgil’s tongue was working unconsciously; Dolores’ eyes looked vague and distant. They did not focus on Flapping Eagle.

– Earthquake, she said.

– What? said Flapping Eagle. Dolores appeared not to hear.

– The Great Turtle moved, she said to Virgil and cackled.

Virgil looked at her worriedly, as she broke off and said gravely:

– No, no, I was mistaken. Nothing happened. Nothing changes.

– Is Mrs O’Toole all right? asked Flapping Eagle.

– Yes, yes, said Mr Jones, shepherding her into the room. A little overwrought, he said in an aside to Flapping Eagle. Rest is what she needs. I suggest you and I go for a walk. Have our little chat. Let her rest, wouldn’t you agree?

– Of course, said Flapping Eagle.

So they left her in the hut and walked towards Virgil and Dolores’ night-hollow. When they were gone, Dolores moved jerkily towards the old trunk that lay unopened in the corner. This is where the past sat locked, her past, unchanged, unchangeable. She sat on the ground and embraced the trunk, whispering to it.

– It is yesterday, she whispered. Every day is yesterday, so every day is fixed.

XIII Dimensions

FLAPPING EAGLE, SENSITIVE to changes in atmosphere, knew that the Virgil Jones of this morning was a different man from the Virgil Jones of the previous night. He also felt that Dolores O’Toole’s antagonism to him, so imperceptible at first, was hardening fast. But this morning he had deliberately closed his mind to both these facts; he wanted information from Mr Jones. The sooner he knew the nature of Calf Island and its mountain, not to mention the whereabouts of Bird-Dog and Sispy, the sooner he could leave the outcast couple to their devices and move on down his solitary road.

Virgil Jones led him away from the hut and into the fringes of the wood. They sat beside a deep well. Or, rather, a deep hole that had been meant for a well, but was quite dry. Virgil Jones was making a valiant attempt to conceal some strong emotion behind a schoolmasterly façade.

– Very well, he said. Might I begin by reminding you of your own adventures… and indeed misadventures. By your own account you have had at least one or two experiences which would normally be classed as supernatural. Your very acceptance of immortality, for instance: most human beings would classify that as sorcery. So, then. You must accept that the world in which you lived was no simple, matter-of-fact place.

Flapping Eagle nodded.

– Chanakya, said Virgil Jones. By which I do not mean myself but an ancient philosopher-king of that name, used to say that the world was neither what it seemed, nor what it did not seem, nor more, nor less, but all those things. Both what it appears to be and not what it appears to be. That is to say, I think it was Chanakya who said that. It was such a long time ago, you follow. But for the sake of argument, let us accept it as a genuine quote.

His eyes flickered momentarily to a hollow in the ground nearby and then dragged themselves away again.

– Let me put it another way, he said. When you look at me, you perceive that I am solid. By contrast, when you look at the well-shaft, you perceive that it is empty. Now would you agree that the reason for those two descriptions has a great deal less to do with the nature, either of the well or myself, than it has to do with the way you see us both?

Flapping Eagle frowned.

– Forgive me, said Mr Jones. I see you are confused, and why not? But observe: I myself am composed of matter, which, in its turn, is composed of tinier particles and so on into the ultra-microcosm. The fact is that the spaces between the particles of matter which compose me are just as great as the spaces between the particles of matter composing the air in that well-shaft. So that, with a different set of tools of perception-I mean other than eyes-one could conclude say, either that I am as “empty” as the air in the shaft, or that it is as “full” or “solid” as I.

– I suppose so… said Flapping Eagle doubtfully.

– What I am driving at, said Virgil Jones, in my rather indirect fashion, is that the limitations we place upon the world are imposed by ourselves rather than the world. And, should we meet things which do not conform to our structure of reality, we place them outside it. Ghosts. Unidentified flying objects. Visions. We suspect the sanity of those who claim to see or sense them. An interesting point: a man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.

– Mm, said Flapping Eagle.

– ”Go, go, go, said the bird,” intoned Virgil Jones.

– What?

– A literary reference, said Virgil Jones. A whim. A piece of self-indulgence. Let us continue, and accept my apologies for the digression.

Perhaps I might make a highly inexact analogy to demonstrate my thesis. Here we all are, a world of living beings and inanimate objects and gusts of breeze, all of us composed of infinitely more empty space than solid matter. Is it not a conceptual possibility that here, in our midst, permeating all of us and all that surrounds us, is a completely other world, composed of different kinds of solids, different kinds of empty spaces, with different perceptual tools which make us as non-existent to its inhabitants as they are to ours? In a word, another dimension.

– I don’t know, said Flapping Eagle. What if there were?

– If you concede that conceptual possibility, said Mr Jones, you must also concede that there may well be more than one. In fact, that an infinity of dimensions might exist, as palimpsests, upon and within and around our own, without our being in any wise able to perceive them.

And further: there is no reason why those dimensions should operate solely on our scale. The infinity could range from the tiniest micro-particle, the smallest sub-atom, to the universe. Is it not fascinating to speculate that we might all exist within the spaces of a few subatomic particles in some other, unknowably vast universe?

Flapping Eagle felt irritated. -It might well be interesting, he said brusquely, but I don’t see its relevance to the whereabouts of my sister.

– My dear Eagle, said Mr Jones, I have simply been striving, as it were, to widen your eyes. There is no other manner in which I can explain to you the location of Calf Island.

Flapping Eagle’s thoughts fell into a dizzy spin. He could not speak.

– Perhaps you have come across the theory of potential existences, continued Virgil Jones affably. So suppose there were, say, merely four potential pasts and futures for the Mediterranean Sea. In one of them, there never was nor will be an island such as this. In another the island existed but no longer does. In a third the island does not exist but will at some time in the future. And in the fourth… he gestured around him… it has existed; and continues to do so.

He allowed a brief dramatic pause.

– The dimensions come in several varieties, you see, he said. There are a million possible Earths with a million possible histories, all of which actually exist simultaneously. In the course of one’s daily life, one weaves a course between them, if you like, but that does not destroy the existence of pasts or futures we choose not to enter. What has happened to you is that you have fallen into a different historical continuum, in which Calf Island, and all of us, have our being. The place you came from knows nothing of us.

– So you are all ghosts, said Flapping Eagle, and I am mad. Is that what you are saying? I’m seeing things, places, that do not exist.

– That is really too depressing a notion, said Virgil Jones. Because it has this obverse: perhaps it is you who is the ghost. And your sister Bird-Dog.

– Where is she? asked Flapping Eagle viciously, as though seeing her would resolve all his confusions.

– I’m not sure, said Virgil. Up there somewhere. I assure you that the chances of finding her are remote; even if your arrival here proves you to be highly sensitive to the existence of the Dimensions.

– It’s not that big an island, cried Flapping Eagle.

Virgil Jones said nothing for a moment, and then: -Please think about it, Mr Eagle. You see why we wished to wait until you were well.

– I’ll find her, said Flapping Eagle.

– Touch wood, said Virgil Jones. He walked to a tree and did so.

– In a structure of reality where anything is possible, he said shamefacedly, I find it better to be safe than sorry. Hence my somewhat ridiculous predilection for superstition. There might be an evil spirit in that tree, after all. There might be an avenging god. It might be possible to conjure demons. The lines on one’s palm might speak the truth. Symbols might be as real as people. One theory has it that in this dimension, as indeed in yours, we overlay our symbolic natures with this vast, obscurantist weight of personality. Thus making it very difficult for us to know the true forces that move us. Given this never-ending stream of possibilities, I find my little foibles a comfort.

Flapping Eagle was sitting very still, his knuckles white, his fists locked shut, his mouth a thin, tight line.

– Come, come, Mr Eagle, said Virgil Jones. I had thought you were a more flexible soul than this.

– I’m going up the mountain today, said Flapping Eagle. I want to find Bird-Dog and Sispy and get myself out of this whole vile mess.

– O, but you mustn’t, said Virgil Jones.

– Why not? shouted Flapping Eagle.

– It’s the Grimus Effect, said Virgil Jones. It gets more powerful all the time. To tell the truth, it’s just a question of waiting until its power reaches down here. I really wouldn’t advise you to climb.

Flapping Eagle felt ill again.

– What Effect? he asked, wearily.

– Grimus. The Grimus Effect.

– What the hell is that?

– Ah, said Virgil, I think you’ve had enough for one day. Suffice to say this: the slopes of Calf Mountain are full of monsters, Mr Eagle. You’d never survive without a guide. Possibly not even then.

Flapping Eagle shook his head, an utterly bewildered man, and buried his face in his hands. Virgil Jones came over to him and put a hand on his shoulder.

– I’m very sorry, he said. I’m very, very sorry.

– No. It’s my turn to apologize, said Flapping Eagle. I’m behaving like a bad-tempered child.

– Entirely understandable, my dear fellow, said Virgil Jones, good-naturedly,

– Perhaps you could explain about the monsters?

Virgil Jones nodded sadly.

– You are quite resolved, are you not? he said.

– Yes, said Flapping Eagle. For better or worse.

– What I have been describing are the Outer Dimensions, said Mr Jones. There are Inner Dimensions as well. One never knows what universes may lie locked within one’s mind. The Effect can work upon the mind with devastating effects.

He fell silent. Flapping Eagle pressed him for more, but he would only say:

– There are some things about Calf Mountain which cannot be explained, only experienced. I hope you never experience them, Mr Eagle. I have grown fond of you. There is a great deal of spirit in that questing frame, is there not?

Flapping Eagle smiled uncertainly.

– Consider this well, gestured Virgil quickly to cover his embarrassment. It is physical proof that not all superstitions are effective. It was, as a matter-of-fact, the use of a divining-rod that settled me on this spot; and as you see it is bone-dry. But one does not have the heart to fill it up; one hopes against hope that water will begin to seep through those parched walls.

– But you didn’t need a well, said Flapping Eagle. There’s the stream. He pointed at the freshwater rivulet that ran through the trees.

Virgil Jones snorted. -It was something to do, he said, even if it was a bad idea.

– It’s a sad ambition you have, Mr Eagle, said Virgil Jones. To grow old, to die; how is it that someone like you, so young in mind and body, can have such an ambition?

Flapping Eagle replied, with a bitter tone in his voice which surprised him: -I want to return to the human race.

A dark look flashed across Mr Jones’ face: shock first, then something more like… apology? He seemed to apologize a lot, thought Flapping Eagle.

– Interesting, said Virgil, that you should think of death as such a humanizing force.

Flapping Eagle’s confusions had settled into a slough of unwanted depression; Virgil Jones appeared to be no merrier. He stood up, shook himself, straightened his hat, dusted his trousers, and attempted to lighten the atmosphere.

– Calf Mountain, I’ve always thought, is rather like a giant lingam weltering in the yoni that is the Sea, he offered, and was forced to explain to the uncomprehending Flapping Eagle: A Sanskrit circumlocution, my dear Eagle. Small pleasantry. I fear I have a rather obscure sense of humour.

Then the gloom descended on him again, and he went on: -Though why I should see this wretched place as so overtly phallic, I cannot think. After all the one thing we have in common on the island is… He broke off.

– What? asked Flapping Eagle.

– But you must know, sir, said Virgil Jones, retreating behind a shell of formality. Sterility. Sterility. That is what I left unsaid. A tragic side-effect of the Drink of life. You will find no children on this rock, godforsaken as it is. Sterile, every manjack of us.

Including you.

Bitterness had now entered the voice of Virgil Jones.

Flapping Eagle walked away towards the hut. He left Virgil Jones deep in thought, absentmindedly snapping twigs in half.

XIV Enemies

IN NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES, Flapping Eagle would have felt an instinctive sympathy for Mrs O’Toole, physically distorted as she was. He himself had suffered the social darts that fly at the freak; they should have had much in common. He now knew why they did not. If Virgil Jones was right in saying that Calf Mountain could not, should not be climbed without an experienced guide, it was obvious who that guide had to be. Flapping Eagle realized that he was impatient to set off, catching himself in the act of wondering how to persuade Mr Jones to accompany him. No wonder Dolores was distraught; no wonder she had turned against him after that polite, friendly beginning.

Could she be persuaded to come as well? That would be the neatest solution, he thought. If she would not come, then it had to be admitted that she and Flapping Eagle must now be enemies. The admission did nothing to lessen his depression.

XV The Trunk

O, IT WAS a certain thing, the trunk, so ponderous, so cobwebbed, so comforting, the trunk with its long-broken locks, never opened, captor of her life. O, it was a wondrous thing to be so sure, to hold her memories so fast. Open it now and let them flood her, washing her in certainties of days and griefs that could not change a jot. The moving finger writes and having writ moves on. Nor all your tears wash out a word of it. Nor tears nor the ghost of an eagle. Sure, sure, sure, as fixed in the fluid of the years as her immortal body, immortal now as souls, replenished daily, neither growing old nor young, static. The present is tomorrow’s past, as fixed, as sure, the trunk would tell her so. There, the creak, the weight of the lid lifted, the open gape of time. There, the candles, devoted servants of god, immortal invisible godonlywise, in light inaccessible hidfromoureyes. O thou who changest not abide with me. No, no, they can’t take this away from me. O, the candles, how did I lapse, how misuse them so, stark white pure candles? Look, the photographs, yellow as dust and half as crumbling, ashes to ashes, into the grave the great queen dashes. Grave Virgil, named for a poet, photograph him if only there were a camera and fix him there, yellow and crumbling, for evermore. Her eyes, better than any camera, conjure him now before them, hold him there, not yellow, not crumbling, warm flesh as she felt it in the night, folds enfolding her to make her safe and send the time away, nothing can change beneath the folds. There, the photographs. The little girl, poor dear thing said Auntie to have the hump. The hump, the hump, the cameeelious hump. She, La Belle Dame Aux Camelious. Or sans mercy. Merciful heavens that do not alter, there, see the uniform, the little nunkit, conventpure little girl, say seven ave marias and he won’t go away. There, the past. Put him in the trunk, dear gravedigger poet, put him there to stay unaltered, put him in the trunk and keep him, folded, enfolded, the same for ever and ever, world without end, our men. Fix me jesus, fix him in a song, the fat greekname, virgil virgil give me your answer do. I’m half crazy all for the love of you. And how could he leave, how return to all that pain? The wounds are closed here, the hurt half-healed, here he is safe and I to make him so, safe in the unchanging daytoday. No eagle can snatch him away, no eagle take him back to his past, the past is sure, it cannot be re-entered, fixed and yellow and crumbling, the past. The moving finger having writ. Close the trunk, put away childish things, it is done and he stays and nothing will change nothing nothing nothing there is nothing to change it and we shall stay virgil and dolores fixed and unchanging in the glue of love. Poor dear grave-digger jones, so much to remain forgotten in him, the weight of the past and its doings ensures the present will not change. Virgil, virgil, give me your answer do. There, the trunk, shut, sure, certain, fixed. Pat it so and be grateful. Now might I do it, pat. Pat, it is done.

She swept the room and tidied the table, rolled the rushmats and dusted the rocking-chair, stoked the embers and filled the pot with water and roots, and began to prepare food for two. There were only the two of them, solid as a rock, immutable as the room, Dolores O’Toole and Virgil Jones, Virgil O’Toole and Dolores Jones, Virgil Dolores and Jones O’Toole, Virgil O’Dolores and Dolores O’Virgil. Like the two queers: William Fitzhenry and Henry Fitzwilliam. She cackled as she worked.

She did not see the ghost at first. It stood, tallish and fairish in the doorway looking worried, trying to decide how to express its problems to her. Eventually, since she continued to ignore it, it coughed.

She turned to the doorway, the word Virgil! forming on her lips, and froze. Her mouth opened and worked noiselessly, a scream without a sound. She backed slowly away from it until she stumbled against the trunk.

– Mrs O’Toole, it said. Are you ill? You look like death.

Terror entered her. She hauled open the lid of the trunk and jumped in. Rummaging feverishly, she found what she was looking for. She held it up: a small crucifix, carved in wood, crumbling with the work of maggots.

She said: -Apage me, Satanas.

– Dolores, said the ghost. It’s all right. Dolores.

– Go away, said Dolores O’Toole. You aren’t there. We live alone. Virgil Jones and Dolores O’Toole. There is no-one else. Look: there are only two mats. I am cooking for two. There are only two of us. That doesn’t change.

– Do you recognize me? said the ghost, slowly. Do you know who I am?

– Go away, said Mrs O’Toole, cowering behind the edge of the trunk. Don’t come closer. Go back where you came from. Go back where you belong. Go back to Grimus. Spectre of the Stone Rose, begone! I don’t believe in you.

– The Stone Rose, repeated the ghost. Grimus. What…

– Apage me! shrieked Dolores O’Toole and pulled the lid of the trunk shut over her head.

The ghost stood in the centre of the room, wondering what to do. Finally, since he wished to speak to Dolores in private, he decided against summoning Virgil Jones just yet. He approached the trunk.

– God protect me, came from within as he lifted the lid.

– Mrs O’Toole… Dolores… said the ghost, I’ve a proposition for you.

– No, no, said Dolores. You’re not here.

– I know you’d rather I left, said the ghost; I know you’re worried I’ll try and persuade Virgil to come with me. But what I’m suggesting is this: would you come, too? Would you?

– You cannot tempt me up the mountain, said Dolores, her eyes gleaming. Up there is the past. We left it behind. The past cannot be re-entered. Nothing changes. The past is fixed. Go away.

The ghost sighed.

– Then I must be your enemy, it said. Dear Mrs O’Toole, I am sorry, believe me; especially since I see you are ill. I’ll go and get Virgil… Mr Jones.

– Leave him alone! cried Dolores. Go away and leave him alone!

The ghost left her.

Flapping Eagle, running to find Virgil Jones, remembered overhearing, when he was still young, two women of the Axona talking.

One of them had said: -We must be careful with Born-From-Dead.

And the second woman, the older of the two, had replied, -Yes. To be born thus is to have death sitting always behind the eyes.

And Livia Cramm had said the same.

And Virgil Jones had named him Destroyer.

And yet he had wanted none of it.

So who did?

And who or what was Grimus?

And the Stone Rose?

And would Virgil Jones agree to accompany him? Or would Mrs O’Toole’s illness be the deciding factor?

He ran, panting, to the hollow by the well.

XVI Snap

IT WAS THE well that finally helped Virgil Jones to decide; but before he reached that point, he had snapped almost every twig he could find. When he broke them, he threw the pieces into the well.

This is how he persuaded himself:

Nicholas Deggle could not have known that Flapping Eagle would meet old Virgil.

Snap.

Ergo, he could have sent the Axona to Calf Mountain purely as an experiment, to see if the Gate he had built would hold.

Snap.

Which meant he intended to follow.

Snap.

If Nicholas Deggle returned, life would be insupportable anyway. After Grimus, Virgil Jones must rank as his main enemy. Ever since he was expelled from the island.

Snap.

If he did not return, life would scarcely be better. The effect was spreading. Dolores had made experimental forays a little way up the slopes and she had felt it. Once it reached their little hovel, it would be no better than K. For Dolores, at any rate.

Snap.

But Nicholas Deggle must have known (Flapping Eagle must not know, not yet) what Flapping Eagle, wanting what he wanted, being what he was, would do to the island. What he would in all probability do.

Snap.

Still, there was little merit left in staying put.

Snap.

Except for Dolores, of course: she would never climb the mountain again. But then, it was possible to argue that should he agree to guide Flapping Eagle-the irrevocable choice-he would be doing so for Dolores’ sake.

Snap.

Then again, what if Deggle arrived once he had left? Could Dolores cope? He thought about that for a moment; then he concluded that, if he did go, he would have to assume that she could.

Snap.

A crucial question: would he be any use as a guide, damaged as he was by past experience of the dimensions? Again, a bleak answer: he would have to hope for the best.

Snap.

Another crucial question: Could he influence Flapping Eagle sufficiently to make the whole plan work? Yet again, uncertainty: it all depended on how Flapping Eagle reacted to what he encountered on the mountain.

Snap.

And yet, was there an alternative? What with the growth of the effect, and the increased frequency of the admittedly minor earth-tremors, the island was deteriorating, and not at all slowly.

Snap.

It was at this point that the well helped. He threw the broken twig into it and reflected upon the similarity between the well and the island. An idea that didn’t work. Did one abandon it, set oneself apart from it as he had done from the life of the island? Did one attempt to save it? Or did one agree to destroy it, in the same way as one would fill up a dry well…?

Like Flapping Eagle, who had already chosen ascent instead of stasis; like Dolores O’Toole, who, last night, had chosen to speak her love rather than keep silent any more; in the same way, Virgil Jones decided upon action rather than prolonged inaction. Because it was there to be done, as the chicken had been there for Flapping Eagle to kill, as Dolores’ love had been there to be declared, and as the well was there to fill. One does, in the end, what there is to do, he told himself, and stood up, straightening his bowler hat, blinking.

He snapped a last twig, and then Flapping Eagle arrived at a run.

Virgil Jones took his courage in both hands and said:

– Mr Eagle, are you still set upon climbing the mountain?

Flapping Eagle stopped, out of breath.

– Yes, he said, and was about to continue when Virgil said:

– In that case, you must permit me to be your guide.

Flapping Eagle was struck dumb by the unexpectedness of the statement.

– Mrs O’Toole, he said at last. I don’t think she’s very well.

Dolores O’Toole was still in the trunk when Virgil went into the hut-alone, on Flapping Eagle’s suggestion.

She stood up with a cry of pleasure as he came in.

– Virgil, she said. I was so afraid.

– Now, now, Dolores, he said helplessly, feeling grossly hypocritical.

She climbed out of the trunk and came to him, standing in front of him like a vulnerable chimpanzee.

– Nothing will change, will it, Virgil? she repeated.

Virgil Jones closed his eyes.

– Dolores, he said. Please try to understand. I must go up the mountain with Mr Eagle. I must.

– O good, she cried all at once, clapping her hands. I knew it would be all right.

He looked at her. -Dolores, he said. Did you hear? We are going to leave in the morning. Leave.

– Yes, she said, early in the morning. We’ll go down to the beach as usual, and I’ll carry your chair for you, clumsy and shortsighted as you are. My love.

– O god, said Virgil Jones.

– It’s not your fault, he said outside, to Flapping Eagle. Please ascribe no blame to yourself. It is my responsibility. Mea culpa.

– You’ll stay with her, of course, said Flapping Eagle.

– No, said Mr Jones. If acceptable to you, we leave tomorrow morning.

Flapping Eagle had to ask: -Why, Mr Jones? Why choose me?

Mr Jones smiled crookedly. -My dear fellow, he said, never look a gift horse in the mouth. Do you know Latin?

– No, said Flapping Eagle. Or just a few words.

– Timere Dañaos et dona ferentes, said Mr Jones. Do you follow me?

– No, said Flapping Eagle.

– Perhaps it’s just as well, said Virgil Jones, if we are to be friends.

XVII Ascent

TO KEEP DOLORES calm, Flapping Eagle had dinner alone that night, by the well; Virgil Jones brought it out to him. He was puzzled; there was a whole set of facts that didn’t add up: some awful history of which he was unaware, and which had brought Mr Jones to his surprising decision. He tried to work it out and failed; so he tried to go to sleep instead, and eventually succeeded.

Meanwhile, Virgil Jones was making a despairing attempt to break through the barrier in Dolores’ mind.

– You remember Nicholas Deggle, he said.

– O yes, said Dolores, quite normally. I never took to him. Good riddance, I thought, when he disappeared.

– He didn’t disappear, Dolores. He was thrown out. So listen: if he should arrive, don’t mention you knew me. All right?

– Very well, darling, she said equably, but you’re being foolish. Why, he’ll see you, for heaven’s sake.

– Dolores, exclaimed Virgil Jones, I’m going away!

– I love you too, said Mrs O’Toole.

Virgil shook his head in a gesture of impotence.

– Listen, Dolores, he tried again. Nicholas Deggle has a grudge against me. So don’t let him know I loved you… love you. For your own sake.

– Darling, said Mrs O’Toole, I want to tell the whole world about our love. I want to shout it out all over the island. I want…

– Dolores, said Virgil Jones. Stop. Stop.

– I’m so glad you’re staying, she said. And I’m proud of you, too.

– Proud, echoed Mr Jones.

– O yes, she said. For chasing away that spectre from Grimus. That was well done. Now nothing can happen.

– No, said Mr Jones, admitting defeat. Nothing.

That night, Virgil Jones dreamt of Liv. Tall, beautiful, deadly Liv, who had been the breaking of him so long ago. She was the centre of the whirlpool and he was falling towards her as her mouth opened in a smile of welcome and opened further and wider and opened and opened and he fell towards her and the water rushed up over his head and he broke, like a twig.

Flapping Eagle woke several times during the night, since the bare ground was both hard and lumpy. There was an itching on his chest. He scratched at it sleepily, and thought as he drifted off again: That damn scar.

That damn scar played him up sometimes.

Tiusday morning again. Misty.

Virgil Jones was shaken gently awake. He found Mrs O’Toole smiling at him, saying: -Time to get up, my love.

He got up. Methodically, he took an old bag from its peg on the wall, filling it with fruit and vegetables.

– Why ever do you need all that for the beach, dear? asked Dolores. He didn’t reply.

– I’ll need your belt now, my love, she said, attempting a dulcet tone. He dressed in silence: the black suit, the bowler hat.

– Dolores, he said, I need the belt myself today.

– O, she pouted. Well, if you’re going to be like that, I’ll manage without it.

She hoisted the chair on to her hump. -Come on, she cooed. Time to be off.

– I’m not coming with you, he said.

– All right, dear, she said; you come on behind as usual. I’ll see you down there.

– Goodbye, Dolores, he said.

She hobbled out of the hut with the rocking-chair on her back.

He collected Flapping Eagle from the wellside. The Axona had tied a cloth around his forehead and stuck a feather in at the back.

– Ceremonial dress, he joked; Virgil Jones didn’t smile.

– Let’s go, he said.

The rocking-chair sat upon the beach, with its back to the sea. Beside it, on the greysilver sands, Dolores O’Toole sat and sang her songs of mourning and requition.

– O, Virgil, she said. I’m so, so happy.

Waiting in the forests on the slopes of Calf Mountain, silent, invisible, as the fat, stumbling man and his tallish feathered companion, feather bobbing beside bowler, made their progress up the overgrown paths, watching over them and waiting, was a Gorf.

XVIII Magister Anagrammari

THE GORFIC PLANET is sometimes called Thera. It winds its way around the star Nus in the Yawy Klim galaxy of the Gorfic Nirveesu. This area is the major component of the zone sometimes termed the Gorfic Endimions. The Gorfic obsession with anagram-making ranges from simple rearrangement of word-forms to the exalted level of the Divine Game of Order. The Game extends far beyond mere letter-puzzling; the vast mental powers of the Gorfs make it possible for them anagrammatically to alter their very environment and indeed their own physical make-up-in the latter case within the severe limits imposed by their somewhat grotesque given material. The Rules of the Game are known as Anagrammar; and to hold the title of Magister Anagrammari is the highest desire of any living Gorf.

“Living” is a troublesome term, for Gorfs are not life-forms as we know them. They need no food, no water, no atmosphere, and possess only one intangible sensory tool which serves for sight, sound, touch, taste, smell and quite a lot besides: a sort of aura or emanation surrounding their huge, hard, useless bodies.

To be explicit: the Gorfs look like nothing so much as enormous sightless frogs, with one important peculiarity. They are made entirely out of rock.

Their origins are lost in mystery; some radiation, perhaps, blasting their now-barren planet, formed the rock into these masterpieces of intelligence and at the same time trapped them in the tragic irony of near-immobility and total isolation. For this is the tragedy of the Gorfs: not only Thera itself, but the entire Endimions, is totally devoid of any other life-form. No animals bound, no plants wave, nor is there any breeze to wave them.

This irony prevented the Gorfs, for several millennia, from being able to determine how advanced a culture they actually were, having no standards of measurement. The result was a certain philosophical paranoia. The supreme Master of the Game, Dota himself, asked in the celebrated Questions of Dota: And are we actually to be the least intelligent race in our Endimions?-a philosophy of despair: he who is unique is both largest and smallest. Our own Gorf, the one now eagerly overseeing the progress of Flapping Eagle and Mr Virgil Jones, took especial pride in his Ordering of this last and most famous of the Questions. He had altered it to make quite a different question, thus: Determine how catalytic an elite is; use our talent and learning-lobe. This is a perfect use of Anagrammar; for not only does it contain all the letters of the Chiefest Question and only those letters, but moreover, it enriches the Question itself, adding to it the concept of elitism and its desirability, the concept of catalysis and its origins, and instructions about how the question is to be answered. “Talent” to the Gorfs means only one thing: skill at Ordering. Thus the very skill that caused the Chiefest Question to be asked must be used in its solution, with the aid of the “Learning-lobe”, that inexhaustible memory-vault locked within each Gorf, giving the species absolute recall of anything that has ever befallen any Gorf.

The title of Magister Anagrammari, and the modest acclaim that resulted, (the Gorfs not being an excitable race) now came the way of our Gorf, and may fairly be said to have turned his head (though properly speaking, he had none).

It should be pointed out that the Gorfs had developed no orthodox technology; the Divine Game sufficed them for science and art. Their philosophy, as may be observed from the above example, preferred questions to answers; even though our Gorfs Ordering of Dota’s Question hinted at the source of an answer, he was well aware that further Orderings might make its examination impossible. However, our Gorf, filled with his triumph, now moved towards heresy. He developed a minor branch of the Divine Game to such a point that it threatened the Game itself. It also gave the Gorfs the chance, at last, of measuring the extent of their brilliance or mediocrity against other civilizations.

The minor branch was called Conceptualism. It is perhaps best defined in one of the rare Statements of Dota: “I think, therefore it is” It was our Gorf who first saw the tremendous implications of this statement. Dota had intended it to mean simply that nothing could exist without the presence of a cognitive intellect to perceive its existence; our Gorf reversed this to postulate that anything of which such an intellect could conceive must therefore exist. He followed this by conceiving the possibility of other Endimions: other Endimions containing accessible life-forms. The Gorfs were not sure whether to cheer or throw brickbats. Suddenly they felt exposed. The comfortable, if melancholy, period of isolation was being brought to a rapid close…

To pacify the fears of his fellow-beings, our Gorf then conceptualized an Object. An Object would exist in every single conceivable Endimions, and it was only through contact with Objects that movement between the Endimions would be possible. This would give the Gorfs a measure of control over their new Idea.

It was through such an Object that our Gorf came into contact with Grimus. And Calf Island. In order to observe it without being himself involved, he Ordered his own vile body in such a way as to make him invisible. And watched.

As he watched over the stumbling ascent of Mr Jones and Flapping Eagle, he felt a mounting excitement. His aura positively quivered with pleasure. This was why: ever since he arrived at Calf Island he had sensed a missing link, an absence of some vital ingredient that would stabilize the structure of the place. Any Gorf would have spotted that: it was one of the elementary stages of the Divine Game to be sure of one’s components. This sure-ness became, in the hands of a Master, a kind of instinct; so that the Gorf knew, when he saw Flapping Eagle, that this man was the link. That this journey, if completed, would also complete the Ordering of the island and the mountain. He longed to know what that Order would be like.

If our Gorf had a fault, it was that he was a meddler. Long years of Ordering had given him a consuming passion for it. So far, on Calf Island, he had resisted the temptation; but now, now that the great, final events for which the island had (unconsciously) been waiting were in train, he found a reason for meddling.

He argued:

Only if you were Grimus would you be fully conscious of what was happening on Calf Island.

Unless, that is, you were a Gorf.

Now, since consciousness is a dynamic condition (that is, you have to choose whether to act or not to act upon your knowledge, and even a decision to remain inactive is an action) it becomes the privilege, not to say duty, of conscious beings to move, and possibly alter the flow of their times.

Thus it was perfectly proper for a Gorf on Calf Island, knowing what he knew, being what he was, to act as he saw fit.

The Gorf nodded gleefully to himself. He was almost hoping for one especial treat before the Final Ordering: almost hoping that Flapping Eagle would fall under the terrifying and often fatal spell of Endimions-Fever.

Of course, he told himself, he would have to be very careful.

XIX Fever

THICK FOREST, DARK as the tomb. Behind them the broken, isolated mind of Dolores O’Toole, abandoned by love at the very moment at which she had allowed it to possess her; ahead of them, K and whatever it held. Between the two, the inhospitable slopes and Forest of Calf. All that spurred Flapping Eagle on was the phantasm of Bird-Dog in his mind’s eye, walking away from him hand-in-hand with the faceless Mr Sispy. He wished he knew what spurred Virgil Jones.

A faint whine in the corners of his head. He had the impression it was growing louder as they climbed the mountain tracks. Virgil Jones gave no sign of hearing it; he wore the lost air of a man trying to recall old habits. -Yes, yes, he would mutter to himself every so often and plunge heavily through this or that thicket. Drat, he would swear on occasion and bury his head in his hands, lost in memories or recriminations-and then he would jerk up again, ploughing forward like a wounded buffalo. Flapping Eagle followed; and so they forged their erratic way through the undergrowth and up the Mountain.

The whine was still there; were his ears playing tricks? Did it seem to be getting louder only because he was thinking about it? He struck the side of his head with the flat of his hand, in exasperation. For an instant, he had the impression that the forest was a solid impenetrable mass, surrounding, enclosing. He blinked, and it passed; there was the faint track again.

Virgil Jones was staring at him.

– Why did you cry out? he asked.

– Whatever do you mean? asked Flapping Eagle.

– You didn’t hear yourself?

– I most certainly did not, said Flapping Eagle, annoyed. Is this a joke?

– No, no, I assure you, said Mr Jones. Tell me, can you hear anything at all? A kind of high-pitched whistle?

– Yes… said Flapping Eagle, alarm growing.

– Right, said Virgil Jones. I’m afraid my hearing, like my eyesight, is somewhat diminished, particularly in the upper registers. The fact is, we are entering the zone of the Effect. It now becomes of vital importance that we talk to each other.

– What Effect? asked Flapping Eagle. And why talk?

– About anything except the Effect, said Virgil Jones. Now is no time for explanations. Please do as I say. Silence could prove very dangerous.

Flapping Eagle bit back a flurry of questions and decided to go along with Mr Jones’ advice.

– Dolores, he said. Will she be all right?

– I hope so, said Mr Jones. I surely hope so.

A brief silence: then Mr Jones burst into speech.

– Did you ever hear the story of how a prostitute once started a civil war in your country? Polly Adams was her name…

But Flapping Eagle’s mind had wandered. He was thinking of Bird-Dog, of Mr Jones’ motives, of the dense wood in which they were lost, of the whine in his ears, the whine in his ears, the whine in his ears, and it grew louder and louder…

Virgil Jones was shouting into his ear:

– A riddle, Mr Eagle. Think about this: Why does an Irishman wear three prophylactics?

Weakness, illness. Both alien things to Flapping Eagle, both now rushing towards and over him like the wave that brought him to Calf Island. That same sensation of puzzled abstraction which he’d felt before passing out on his boat was creeping upon him once more. His legs wobbled; standing became harder and harder, climbing impossible. He came to a halt. His forehead blazed. The whine grew louder still and louder.

– I don’t know, Mr Jones, he said feebly. Why does an Irishman wear three…

Something was distorting his sight. Virgil seemed a mile away; his arm came stretching across light-years like a long, snaking tentacle. Flapping Eagle shied away, instinctively, and fell over. He felt a chill in his bones. His forehead was icy now. The whine now practically deafened him to Virgil’s bellowing voice.

– Don’t worry, Virgil was shouting. Just a touch of Dimension-fever, that’s all. We’ll soon get you better… the words echoed and faded.

Dimension-fever: what was that? Flapping Eagle felt a rage at having been kept in ignorance, and his eyes seemed to clear. He saw a solicitous Virgil Jones leaning over him.

– It’s worse in the dark, Virgil was shouting. I’ll get you to a clearing. Try and concentrate on my voice. I’ll talk all the way. Daylight helps: chases away the monsters.

– Monsters… said Flapping Eagle faintly.

– They come from inside you, said Virgil Jones. Inside you… (His voice, fading, diminishing.)

Confusion returned to Flapping Eagle. Again the distorted vision.

– Can’t explain, Virgil yelled down a long tunnel. To live through it is to understand it. Listen to my voice. Listen only to my voice.

Fear enveloped Flapping Eagle, the fear of a healthy man for an inexplicable disease. He felt his convictions slipping from him; what was he doing here, anyway? What kind of devilry had seized him? Why had he not simply killed himself when he had the chance? Perhaps, after all, he was dead. Yes, he was dead. He had drowned in the boat and this was hell and Virgil Jones was a demon and this was some infernal torture. Yes, he was dead.

O, I remember, I remember: I was Flapping Eagle. As the unknowable swept over me, I went all but mad. Hallucinations… I thought they were hallucinations at first, but gradually they gained the certitude of absolute reality and it was the voice of Virgil Jones that came drifting to me like a dream. The world had turned upside down; I was climbing a mountain into the depths of an inferno, plunging deep into myself.

The scene I saw seemed to freeze; it went through a myriad transmutations, in which colours altered, the trees became moving creatures, the ground became liquid and the sky solid, grass spoke and flowers played music. In some of these transformations Virgil Jones was not there at all; in others he was a huge suppurating monster. In others he was dead. In others I could hear his voice speaking to me, pouring words of comfort and advice into my ear. It was a baptism of fire.

Virgil Jones and I: a strange pair of bedfellows. He a burnt-out man, the shell of his past, secure in the knowledge of some great failure; I an incomplete man, looking for the knowledge of dying which would finish me, seeking my face in the eye of death. For a reason I did not understand until much later, he loved me like a son, like the last of his living sons; and once I recovered from the fever, I loved him too, though I loved him badly and not enough. He nursed me then, dragging me to a clearing, rubbery and sluggish as I was, talking, talking to distract my mind from the depredations of the Effect. In the dark, before we reached the clearing, he was lost to me. In the clearing, his voice gave me some strength. Until he came to get me.

Virgil Jones: a soul without a future helping me to mine, leaving behind him Dolores, his sorrow and love, heading for places long-since fled. A brave man.

To live through the fever of the Dimensions is to abandon the question Why? And yet, before the end, I had an answer to all the unanswered whys, and a few unasked ones as well.

As Virgil Jones dragged Flapping Eagle to the clearing, he said:

– O dear, my friend. I wish it didn’t have to be you. Grimus used to say a man would either lose or find himself in these woods. That is the difference between myself and yourself. I can only lose.

Mr Eagle, you are not a realized man. That is your weakness and also your power. Before one realizes oneself one has the optimism of ignorance. It can be the saving of one’s life. Once realized, one faces the terror of knowing what it is you are and have done… the realized man can have a profound effect on the world about him; he must bear the consequences, and guilt, of that as well…

Finally, in the clearing, he sat down, placed Flapping Eagle’s head on his lap, and answered his own riddle, abstractedly:

– An Irishman wears three prophylactics to be sure, to be sure, to be sure.

To himself he thought:

Now, Mr Jones, we shall see if you are capable of being a guide.

XX Jonah

BIRD-DOG SAID, brandishing a bone:

– Look, little brother. Look. Here’s a bone for you. Good dog. It’s a very special bone. The Bone of K. Take it. Come and bury it.

– Bird-Dog, said Flapping Eagle, slowly. Is it you?

She stood mockingly upon a rock, stamping her right foot as she turned in a slow circle. She tossed him the bone. It fell unerringly into his hand; a rose grew from a crack in it. He stuffed it into his trousers.

She was lying mockingly upon the rock, pulling her raggedy skirt up to her waist and spreading her legs, arching her back.

– Come in, little brother, she said. Come and bury it.

He crawled towards her, weakly, and the nearer he came, the larger she grew. A hundred yards away and she was already as large as a horse. The hole between her legs yawned; its hairs were like ropes. Ten yards away. She was a house, a cavern lying red and palpitating before him, the curtain of hair parting. He heard her booming voice.

– Why resist, she was saying. Give up, little brother. Come in. Give up. Come in. Give up.

He crawled into the cavern. The curtain fell into place behind him, cutting off all light.

Inside… a dark reddish glow. There she was again, fleet Bird-Dog, racing away into her own depths, squealing with childish delight.

– Silly little brother, can’t catch me, she cried and vanished around a corner. He was not yet strong enough to chase. He stood up.

And heard the voice of Virgil Jones.

– The trouble with Grimus, the voice said, is he can’t control the Effect. Its field grows stronger and stronger. You’ll have to get used to it gradually. Control your thoughts. Slowly. Softlee softlee catchee monkee. The inner dimensions are lonely places. We create our own, so to speak. Frightening, that: each man his own universe. Imagine the effect. Men go mad. That’s the tragedy of K. They’re all scared of their own minds. I was, myself, once, but there’s not much of it left now. Like old Father William, eh? Small pleasantry. May I interest you in a theory? Fellow in K, You’ll meet him, calls himself a philosopher, Ignatius Gribb, Ignatius Q. Gribb. Q for Quasimodo. I. Q. Gribb, you see, never knew if it was his idea of a joke or his parents’, the initials. He used to say: -there are no human beings alive. What we all are is Shells, and hovering around in the ether are what he called Forms. Things like emotions, reasons and so forth. They occupy one of us for a while, then another one moves in. It’s pretty in its fashion. Explains the illogicality of some human actions. Shifts of character and so forth It’s completely exploded by the dimensions, of course. The one thing that stays constant in the shifts between the dimensions is one’s own consciousness. But then Mr Gribb tries very hard to ignore the dimensions. They’re a frightening thing. Cultivate your consciousness, Mr Eagle, that’s the way out. There’s always a way. Where there’s a will. Only control you have.

The voice faded away again.

Flapping Eagle took a deep breath, closed his eyes, opened his eyes and tried to establish his whereabouts. It was like standing in foam. Springy, his feet subsided into it. Soft wet reddish foam.

Red: that meant light. If there was colour, there was light, but he could see no light-source. Yet there was light, dim, diffuse, but light. He gave up the search.

He turned to look behind him, at the entrance. It was no longer there. A brief moment of claustrophobia, then calm, despite the ancient saying that grew in his head and took words for itself: Jonah in the belly of the whale.

The survival instinct lies buried deep in soft civilizations; in the peripatetic Flapping Eagle, it lay very near the surface, if somewhat weakened by his knowledge of his immortality. Now, when he was plunged into a world his senses told him could not exist, but which they also told him did exist, this instinct took him over. It did so in a very physical way. He could perceive a thing which was entirely himself but also not-himself assuming command of his faculties and gritting his teeth for him. It was a simple but overwhelming self-command to survive this. He was astonished and a little pleased at the strength of his own will. In extremis veritas.

WHERE THERE’S A WILL. The realization of his own power, of Virgil Jones’ meaning, dawned on him. Here was his way out, if his resolve was strong enough.

He began to practise. At his first attempt, a rose grew from the floor of the Place. (He could not think of it as his sister’s insides, especially as he had seen her disappearing down the fleshy corridor.) The rose died almost at once. He thought about this, and a second rose grew. It showed no signs of dying.

He looked at the floor, and it became solid. A carpet covered it, hand-woven in silk, with an Eye embroidered into the very centre. He used the eye to make windows. It glared at the red walls and they fell into order.

It was really quite an elegant room, even if the walls were a livid red. He felt almost proud of himself.

Outside the windows, Calf Mountain was beginning to form. He got as far as seeing the clearing, the forest around it, and even caught a glimpse of Virgil Jones, who seemed to come right up to one of the windows until his fleshy face filled it. There was a door in the wall, ebony-handled; all he had to do was open it and walk out and he would be well. Controlling the Dimensions was easy, if you knew what you were doing, he told himself cockily. He rather fancied he saw a look of respect in Mr Jones’ eyes.

The Gorf was feeling disappointed. He had locked himself to Flapping Eagle’s self, using the parasitic technique by which Gorfs communicated, and had fully expected a long, delectable time of Endimions-shuffling, which was the next best thing he knew to the Divine Game. But here was Flapping Eagle displaying an exceptional capacity for controlling the Endimions.

The Gorf decided to take a hand. After all, the Final Ordering of the island could wait a little longer-Flapping Eagle found the room dissolving as he reached for the door-handle. The shock wrecked his new-found confidence. The darkness descended. He was, for a moment, blind and giddy. The world seemed to spin rapidly. When his head cleared, the Abyssinians were squatting in front of him.

XXI Strongdancer

THE DANCE HAS had many functions. It has been a social icebreaker and a ritual cloudbreaker. It has been a mark of passion and a sign of hate. Stars have danced in young girls’ eyes and death has danced with its unwilling family. Today, in the hollow of a wood, with the green light of the leaves playing about his face, stark naked, a grim-faced fat man called Virgil Jones was dancing for the life of his new friend.

– Friend: he had repeated the word to himself a million times, he had whispered it into the ear of the unconscious Eagle to give him strength.

– You are the straw, Flapping Eagle, he had said, and I am the drowning man.

Last chances, like first chances, come only once. Virgil Jones was convinced that his last chance was upon him, A last chance to do, to help, to expiate the guilt and the uselessness that lay within him, rusting his insides; a chance to save instead of ruining.

A man who lives in tolerable comfort amidst extreme poverty learns in the end not to see the quagmire of hopelessness. It is a survival mechanism. In just the same way, Virgil Jones had shut out his past from his mind. He had come down the mountain and forgotten the blank terrors he had fled. They were still there, locked in his head, but he did not see them.

Now, for Flapping Eagle’s sake, he unlocked the prison and like Pandora’s uncontrollable sprites his memory came flooding out, grating painfully upon him as it emerged. He had forgotten the pain. So much had been numb for so long.

At first he had thought Flapping Eagle might have been strong enough, had been hardened enough by his long journeys to survive the Dimensions unaided. (But then he had forgotten their devastating power.) And for a moment Flapping Eagle’s eyes had sparked-he had almost pulled his mind away from itself. But he hadn’t been strong enough; and now there was only one thing to do.

Virgil Jones had to go in there, into the dimensions of another man’s mind, more dangerous even than one’s own, and guide him out. The alternative was a foregone conclusion. Flapping Eagle’s mind would overheat and in the end it would burn out, perhaps beyond all saving. As Virgil Jones’ mind had nearly destroyed itself. The worm biting its own tail would finally swallow itself.

Because the worlds that Calf Mountain and its Effect unleashed inside the head were not phantoms. They were solid. They could hit and hurt.

Virgil Jones had sat for an age, running his thoughts over the agonies of his past, when he had travelled the Dimensions, before the Effect had become too huge for him to handle, trying to clutch at the knowledge he needed. He knew that he had known it; that somewhere on his travels he had met-who?-someone-that knew the technique for locking on to the mind of another living being.

Virgil Jones had not told Flapping Eagle about his own travels. In his day he had rejoiced in those interdimensional trips. There had been the voyages to the real, physical, alternative space-time continua. So close, yet such an eternity away. And there had been his own annihilating journey into the Inner Dimensions, like the internal inferno which now clutched Flapping Eagle, which had left him hollow and impotent and lucky to be alive. And there was the third kind.

The bridge between the first two kinds.

With sufficient imagination, Virgil Jones had found, one could create worlds, physical, external worlds, neither aspects of oneself nor a palimpsest-universe.

Fictions where a man could live.

In those days, Mr Jones had been a highly imaginative man.

He fought his way past the unbearable memory of his breakdown, when the power became a monster which turned upon him and seared his mind, and came to the good times. He smiled. What worlds he had visited! What things he had learned! He recalled with admiration the sexual techniques of the Ydjac, the instinct-logic of the plant-geniuses of Poli XI, the tonal sculpture of the Aurelions. The pain was gone now; he was past the block, excavating his own history with the pleasure of the genuine archaeologist. And so he came, eventually, to the time he visited the Spiral Dancers.

Certain kinds of science aspire to the condition of poetry; and on the planet of the Spiral Dancers, a long tradition of scientist-poets had elevated a branch of physics until it became a high symbolist religion. They had probed matter, dividing it into ever-smaller units, until they found at its very roots the pure, beautiful dance of life. This was a harmony of the infinitesimal, where energy and matter moved like fluids. Energy forces came gracefully together to create at their point of union a pinch which was matter. The pinches came together into larger pinches; or else fell away again into pure energy, according to the rules of a highly formal, spiral rhythm. When they came together, they were dancing the Strong-dance. When they fell back into the Primal, they were dancing the Weakdance.

From this discovery came the religion of Spiral Unity. If everything was energy, everything was the same. A thinking being and a table were only aspects of the same force. It had been proven scientifically.

The main ritual of the religion, which was only established after generations of poet-scientists worked on applications of the Theory, was the Spiral Dance. It was a physical exercise based on the primal rhythms, and its purpose was to enable every humble, imperfect living thing to aspire to that fundamental perfection. Dance the Dance, and you would commune with the Oneness surrounding you on all sides.

Virgil Jones stood up.

He removed his old dark jacket. And his old dark trousers. And his old dark waistcoat with the watchless gold chain.

He removed his bowler from his head; and placed all these things, with his undergarments, neatly on Flapping Eagle’s prone form, where they wouldn’t get in the way.

And ignoring his protesting corns, he danced.

The Gorf, already locked in to the mind of Flapping Eagle (which was a good deal easier for him than for Mr Jones) was about to receive a surprise.

Mr Jones circled the body of Flapping Eagle slowly, humming a low-pitched note. As he cud this, he turned round and round, stamping his feet at regular intervals. After a while, he stopped feeling giddy. After a longer while, he no longer had to think about what he was doing. His body took over and guided him on his looping path by remote control. After a much longer while he ceased to be conscious of anything-surroundings, body, anything- except the hum, which hung around him like a curtain. Then that died away (though his vocal chords continued to produce the noise) and for a brief second he was not conscious even of being. It was during that instant that the ripples of Flapping Eagle lapped over his own; and Virgil Jones became attuned to the ailing mind.

If you’d been in the right Dimension, you would have seen a thin veil-like mist encasing the two bodies.

Virgil Jones had gone to the rescue.

XXII Khallit and Mallit

THE GORF WAS pleased with the puzzle he had set Flapping Eagle. Having come to the conclusion that the Amerindian’s near-immunity to Dimension-fever sprang from a temporary paralysis of the imagination, the Master of Ordering had decided to fill the gap with his own. The puzzle he constructed was especially satisfying since all its elements, as well as the way out, had been built from Flapping Eagle’s memories; so that it was a perfectly passable counterfeit of a dimension that a more freely-thinking Flapping Eagle might have entered. The Gorf relaxed and prepared to enjoy Flapping Eagle’s attempts to solve it.

These were the elements of the puzzle:

A place called Abyssinia. Its characteristics sprang from the name the Gorf had taken from Flapping Eagle’s mind. It was a huge abyss, a narrow canyon with stone walls reaching up to the sky. And, just to add an intriguing time-factor, it was getting slowly narrower. The cliffs were encroaching on both sides; they even seemed to be coming together overhead, so that in time they would form a tomb of constricting rock.

At the bottom of the canyon with Flapping Eagle were two Abyssinians. They looked like Deggle, creator of the memory. Both of them were long and saturnine. They wore black cloaks and emerald necklaces. But there the resemblance to Deggle ended. (Even so, it served its purpose; Flapping Eagle was utterly unnerved by the spectacle of twin Deggles standing before him, and forgot about Bird-Dog and his own powers long enough to enable the dimension to “set” firmly, like concrete.)

The Two Abyssinians were called Khallit and Mallit. They were engaged in an eternal argument without beginning or end, its very lack of purpose or decision undermining Flapping Eagle’s ability to think clearly.

One more thing: Flapping Eagle was tied hand and foot. He lay beside the two Abyssinians as they squatted around a campfire. They seemed oblivious of his presence, and did not answer when he spoke to them.

A very pleasing puzzle indeed.

Between them, Khallit and Mallit placed a gold coin. Every so often one of them would flip it; it was the only way they ever decided on any element of their eternal wrangle.

At the present moment, they seemed indirectly to be discussing Flapping Eagle.

– There are two sides to every question, Mallit, are there not?

– Well… said Mallit doubtfully. He flipped the coin. -Yes, he said.

Khallit breathed a sigh of relief.

– Then if good is on one side of the coin, bad is on the other. If peace is on one side, war is on the other.

– Arguable, said Mallit.

– For the sake of argument, pleaded Khallit.

– For the sake of argument, agreed Mallit, after tossing the coin.

– Then if life is on one side, death must be on the other, said Khallit.

– Only if, said Mallit.

– For the sake of argument, they said in unison, and smiled at each other.

The walls of the canyon moved in a fraction.

– But here’s a paradox, said Khallit. Suppose a man deprived of death. Suppose him wandering through all eternity, a beginning without an end. Does the absence of death in him mean that life is also absent?

– Debatable, said Mallit. He flipped the coin. Yes, he said.

– So he is, in fact, no more than the living dead?

– Or no less.

– Would you agree that the major difference between the living and the dead is the power to act?

– For the sake of argument, said Mallit.

– So that such a man would be impotent. Helpless.

– Impotent. Helpless, echoed Mallit.

– Incapable of influencing his own life.

– Incapable of influencing his own life.

– Flung eternally between his doubts and his fears.

– Flung.

Their voices were melodious. Flapping Eagle found himself listening raptly. He had never realized the beauty of speech, the appeal of simply speaking and arguing for ever and ever… he felt his mind slipping away and tried to force it back. It was unconscionably difficult.

He suddenly realized what was happening to the canyon. Because there was a great deal less room in it than when he had first arrived. He struggled desperately against his ropes. To no avail. He screamed at Khallit and Mallit.

– Can the dead speak? asked Khallit.

– Doubtful, said Mallit and tossed the coin. -No, he said.

– No, echoed Khallit.

Flapping Eagle realized bleakly that there was no way out. He remembered Virgil Jones’ whisper: there is always a way out. He no longer believed it. He would lie here, listening to the eternal indecision of these two extrapolations of himself until the rock claimed them.

Flapping Eagle closed his eyes.

The Gorf was feeling irritated this time. What good was such a simple, beautiful puzzle if the man wouldn’t make any attempt to solve it? Of course there was a way out. Very simple it was, too. All the man had to do was work it out. The Gorf had a suspicion that Flapping Eagle would never be any good at the Game of Order.

And then his irritation vanished, to be replaced by wonderment, as something happened for which he had made no provision.

A whirlwind suddenly appeared at one end of the canyon.

Khallit looked up and became highly agitated.

– Mallit, he said. Mallit, is that a whirlwind?

Mallit spun a coin without looking up. -No, he said. It is not.

– Mallit, cried Khallit, it is. It is a whirlwind.

Mallit looked up. -It can’t be, he said.

– But it is, it is, cried Khallit.

The whirlwind came closer and closer.

– Fascinating paradox, said Mallit.

– Fascinating, said Khallit doubtfully.

Then the whirlwind was upon them. Like the mere notions they were, the less-than-human constructs of an alien imagination, the force of Virgil Jones’ arrival dispersed them. They returned to the shreds of energy they had once been. On the planet of the Spiral Dancers, people would have said: -they danced the Weakdance to the end.

Flapping Eagle had opened his eyes. The whirlwind stood in front of him and slowed down. It began to look like a man.

– The Whirling Demon! cried Flapping Eagle, using the phrase after seven centuries.

– Hullo, said Virgil Jones.

A few questions from Virgil Jones, and Flapping Eagle was talking about Deggle and mentioned the word “Ethiopia”. The instant he said the word, the Gorfs puzzle dissolved. Because that was the key, the way out. Ethiopia… Abyssinia… I’ll be seeing you… Goodbye. All he had to do was say Goodbye and the puzzle was solved.

It was easy, the Gorf thought sulkily. It was. The people looked like Deggle. The place was named after one half of his favourite phrase. Even an idiot could have guessed that escape lay through the other half. Even an idiot. That was the trouble with most people. They were so bad at games.

XXIII The Sea

THE SEA FELT pure beneath them, its spray salting their cheeks, stinging, refreshing; a sea of mists and clouds, grey curling waves hidden behind the veils; a sea to be lost on, a drifting, unchanged sea.

Flapping Eagle lay breathless on the raft’s rough boards, half-dazed, uncomprehending; Virgil Jones, a naked speck on another man’s horizons, stood by the tattered sail, on guard, the juices of excitement flowing renewed in his veins. The tableau held and was fixed.

– May I call you Virgil? Flapping Eagle’s voice was hesitant.

Virgil Jones felt inordinately pleased.

– Certainly, certainly. Certainly, call me Virgil.

A long silence, in which a bond was sealed.

– What may I call you? Virgil broke the stillness.

Flapping Eagle didn’t answer.

– Mr Eagle? Virgil Jones turned to look at the Axona.

But Flapping Eagle was asleep.

Virgil lumbered across the raft and sat by the sleeping form.

– Don’t thank me for your life, he said to it. I’m grateful to you, more than I can say. Don’t thank me for coming here; it was a debt paid, a world remembered. Don’t thank me for anything; and don’t be afraid.

The sea curled over the edges of their frail craft, and fell away; curled, and fell away, as the old bull elephant watched over the body of the young-old buck.

– I have some food, said Flapping Eagle, in some surprise. He had reached into the pocket of his ragged trousers and found two old sea-biscuits. He passed one to Virgil Jones, who hid his nakedness behind Flapping Eagle’s old coat. They ate slowly.

– Just call me Flapping Eagle, said Flapping Eagle, and then added: Virgil.

They looked at each other as they munched.

– Everything you’ve ever done, said Virgil, has been a preparation for Calf Mountain, in a way.

Flapping Eagle noticed a difference in Virgil; he was calm rather than stagnant. There seemed to be a surge of strength in him which was very reassuring. Flapping Eagle realized how mutually dependent they had become, and it was a pleasurable realization.

– Everything I ever did, said Virgil, was just the same, in away.

– What sort of thing, asked Flapping Eagle.

– O, said Virgil, I travelled, like you.

The sea whispered secrets to the raft.

– A life, said Virgil, always contains a peak. A moment, you follow, that makes it all worthwhile. Justifies it. At any rate, that’s what I find. You’re either moving towards it or away from it. Or for an instant you’re at it and you’re… full.

They were becalmed. Flapping Eagle sat up, looking at the stillness with equanimity. Virgil’s large tongue licked contentedly at the outskirts of his mouth: patrolling the frontiers.

– Have you ever thought about the phrase: petrified with fear? asked Virgil. Turned to stone, you see.

Flapping Eagle half-turned, half-spoke, but Virgil was far away in a train of thought.

– That’s what they’re like in K, you see, he continued. Petrified. And why? He heaved his shoulders, tossing the weight from them. Why, because of the damned dimensions. (He frowned.) You remember my saying you should fix your mind on one thing, like Bird-Dog. It’s the only defence. The effect is much stronger in K, you know. Much nearer to Grimus. It drove them out of their wits… they found the only way to keep the bloody thing at bay was to be single-minded. To a fault. Obsessive. That’s the word. Obsessions close the mind to the dimensions. That’s what K’s like. Obsessive. You can probably understand why. Petrified with fear. It’s a fearful thing to be a stranger within oneself. People don’t like their own complexities. Tragic, really.

Flapping Eagle asked: What about? Obsessive. What about?

– O, said Virgil, anything. Doesn’t matter. Cleaning the floor, whatever. Carry it to its extreme and it serves to protect. Mrs O’Toole’s obsession with constancy may well be her best protection. As I said, the Effect is spreading, you know. It spreads.

He was silent.

– Often they fix themselves a time in their lives to mull over. Live the same day over and over again. Displaced persons are like that, you know. Always counterfeiting roots. Still. If a false front’s thick enough, it serves. To protect.

There was no time; they sat, stood, moved, slept. At some point, Flapping Eagle had asked:

– What about yourself, Virgil?

– What about me? replied Virgil.

– You were saying every life has a peak… what about you?

– O yes, said Virgil. Long past it.

The silence settled again. Then Virgil said:

– Once. Then. Before. The terror of the titties, eh?

Flapping Eagle asked: -Were you married?

– O, said Virgil, yes. Eventually. Roughly. Temporarily.

There was a wind. The rudimentary sail was full; they moved from anywhere to nowhere across the infinite sea.

– Towards infinity, said Virgil Jones, where all paradoxes are resolved.

– Virgil, asked Flapping Eagle, am I getting better?

– Better?

– The Dimension-fever, said Flapping Eagle. Everything seems to be smooth just at the moment. Am I mending?

– I don’t know, said Virgil. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Usually one meets a few monsters. You know the sort of thing.

– No, said Flapping Eagle.

– At any rate, said Virgil, trying to sound confident, between us, we should be able to handle them.

The Gorf had made a decision. No more meddling. But he might speed things up a bit; he was getting bored. Though Mr Jones’ presence was very interesting.

XXIV Tunnel

LAND ROSE UP from the sea to meet them, but it was unlike any soil or earth either of them had ever seen. It was not so much solid as not-liquid, a viscous, glutinous stuff. At one second it seemed insubstantial as air, at another it acquired the consistency of treacle, at another it lay smooth as glass. It seemed to smoke, or steam, a little.

Virgil Jones knew where they were. It was the nearest they would get to escape, and also the most dangerous of the Inner Dimensions. They stood at the very fringes of Flapping Eagle’s awareness, close to the point at which his senses merged with the void. This was unmade ground, the raw materials of the mind. If they bent it right, it would lead them wherever they wished to go; if they failed to master it, they could drift on its wisps out of Flapping Eagle’s existence. To put it another way, they would die.

The raft had lodged-or stuck-in the land. Gingerly, they placed feet upon the colourless, formless substance. Flapping Eagle looked nervous.

– We’re in very deep, said Virgil and explained.

– Now then, he said, we’ll need to concentrate as hard as we can. Try and imagine the topography of this Dimension, since it seems to be topographic. It’s a series of concentric circles.

– A series of concentric circles, repeated Flapping Eagle.

– We’re on the outermost circle. We need to get to the centre.

– We need to get to the centre, repeated Flapping Eagle.

– Once we’re in the centre, we’ll need to climb. The waking state lies directly above the centre. Do you understand?

– Yes, said Flapping Eagle.

– If we concentrate hard enough we can use this stuff to make a passage. We’ll be able to move through it to the centre without being affected by the Dimensions.

Virgil Jones had taken on a new dimension himself. He was crisp, authoritative. Flapping Eagle settled down to shape the stuff of his mind.

The passage, or tunnel, took shape around them. It was dark grey, suffused with dirty yellow light. In mounting excitement, Flapping Eagle realized that he was shaping it into a passable facsimile of the red tunnel down which Bird-Dog had fled at the beginning of the fever. His strength began to flood back; the malleable not-land stretched into a longer and longer tunnel. Virgil Jones, watching, felt an enormous relief. And finally at the very far end of the tunnel they saw a tiny beckoning pinprick of light.

– Time to go, said Virgil Jones.

Flapping Eagle didn’t speak. All his efforts were plunged into holding the tunnel, preserving its existence until it set. So Virgil Jones, ever co-operative, concentrated on creating a means of transport. A moment later (he derived a sizeable pleasure from the speed) they were the proud possessors of two bicycles.

– I’m sorry, he apologized, the mysteries of the internal combustion engine have always been beyond me.

The tunnel had set. They mounted their anachronistic steeds and headed into its depths, towards the siren light.

For all his recent achievements, for all his new-found confidence, Virgil seemed to Flapping Eagle to be a worried man.

– Virgil, he asked, you wouldn’t hold anything back from me, would you?

– My dear fellow, admonished Virgil Jones. My dear fellow.

– Well, then. You wouldn’t know what’s at the other end of this tunnel, would you?

– My dear fellow, repeated Virgil Jones; and then, after a pause, he added quietly: That depends entirely on you.

– Explain?

– In all probability, said Virgil, there will be nothing at all.

– And that’s what worries you?

Virgil Jones coughed. -You seem to be an unusual fellow, he said. Perhaps you won’t need… He stopped.

– What? asked Flapping Eagle.

– The monsters, said Virgil Jones.

When he had explained, Flapping Eagle knew what had to happen.

The cure for Dimension-fever is a complex thing. It involves more than mere survival, more than just the ability to find one’s way through the labyrinth. If that is all a sufferer has to offer, the fever can recur and recur. Once exposed to it, the sufferer’s resistance is lowered; he can expect further and perhaps worse attacks to set in without warning. Even the cure is sometimes not total; it does, however, insulate the sufferer from the worst the Effect can produce. That is, if it doesn’t kill him.

Lurking in the Inner Dimensions of every victim of the fever is his own particular set of monsters. His own devils burning in his own inner fires. His own worms gnawing at his strength. These are the obstacles he must leap, if he can. Often, sadly, they are stronger than he is; and then he dies. Or lives on, a working body encasing a ruined mind.

Flapping Eagle thought: all he had ever done was survive. To have been so much and done so little. Searching, always searching for the path through the maze that led to Bird-Dog, and Sispy, and his way out. It had left him half a man, unfound even by himself. It was this lack in himself that was now reaching a time of crisis. And, added to it, the cross it seemed he was always to bear, was his responsibility for the life of Virgil, his rescuer, guide and friend. Why, he thought in anguish, why is it that I place the lives, the happinesses of all I touch in danger? I never wished it.

As if reading his thoughts, Virgil said:

– Don’t worry about me. Glad to have been of service. Might even be able to render some assistance.

He knew this to be untrue. It was Flapping Eagle’s fight that must wait at the growing circle of light. No-one could help without hampering his own chances of success,

Flapping Eagle set his jaw.

Bird-Dog: his search: all of it. A gigantic blind alley. A voyage through the waste land that had destroyed his appetite for his greatest treasure: life. He resolved that if he emerged from this tunnel, he would abandon his search. He would go to K and make his home. The discovery and befriending of other human beings was enough, more than enough, even for a man with eternity at his fingertips. If Calf Mountain was not perfect (and it was no Utopia), then what matter? Perfection was a curse, a stultifying finality. He would seek out and grow rich in the glorious fallibility of human beings, dirty, wartish, magnificent creatures that they were.

Virgil half-guessed the thoughts going through his friend’s mind, and his eyes clouded. They had good reason to. He was thinking about his own fate, which was entirely out of his control. Now that Flapping Eagle had set his mind on the contest, it would be waiting as sure as eggs were eggs. Everything hung on the battle. Virgil ordered his mind into something approaching resignation.

The Gorf woke, roused by some mental alarm-system, and immediately began to take an acute interest in events. This was better, he thought. This was something like it. If he had had hands, he would have rubbed them.

On their rickety bicycles, dressed in their forlorn garments, Flapping Eagle and Virgil Jones, Don Quixote and Sancho, rode to their tryst.

XXV Axona’s Champion

THE COLOURS WERE all wrong. The sky was red, the grass mauve, the water a virulent green. Flapping Eagle blinked, but they didn’t change. He looked at the unearthly scene for a long moment and then, gradually, as his eyes accustomed themselves to full light, normality did return.

They were on a river-bank. Behind them was a thickly-wooded hill and the mouth of their tunnel. The river filled the gap between it and the next hill, then emptied itself into what had been a bright green lake. Hills circled them, silent captors and judges. In the centre of the lake stood a stone building, tall and circular. A high-pitched voice chanted words which were, at first, as meaningless to Flapping Eagle as the crazy colours had been; and then his ears, like his eyes before them, found the key to the sounds. Bus heart missed a beat.

It was a chant he had not heard for over seven centuries: a hymn of praise to the great god Axona. He bit his lip. Virgil Jones looked at him, but said nothing.

They were standing by their bicycles at the water’s edge when Flapping Eagle saw the boat. A crude coracle with this name painted on a board tied to its side: Skid-Blade. Flapping Eagle, the master of the knife, felt his spirits sink still lower, and realized that he had read an omen into the name. Where the blade skids, there skid I. He climbed into the boat, motioning Virgil Jones to stay behind; and helplessly, weightily, Mr Jones subsided to the ground as Flapping Eagle paddled out to the stone shrine which was the voice of his past, claiming him. Their bicycles lay crookedly, uselessly, beside Virgil on the empty shore.

It was the votary flame that produced the second illusion. When Flapping Eagle, on his guard, passed through the open door of the shrine, he saw, in light once again dirty and yellow, the forms of two giants shadowed on the far wall. Vast forms: an Axona chieftain in his full headdress sitting in erect profile on a ceremonial stool as a supplicant knelt chanting at his feet; the whole tableau some twenty feet high.

It was, however, the votary flame that had done it. It burned in its stone bowl immediately below the small platform where the scene was actually taking place and cast huge shadows on the distant wall. But even when he deciphered the trick his eyes had played, Flapping Eagle found no relief; partly because, now twice-bitten by illusion, he expected a third; but mostly because he felt in himself both an absolute certainty and a crippling fear that this old, dark, hawknosed, feathered chief was the incarnation of the god Axona himself. And, the dimension being what it was, the truth was as he believed it to be.

The god Axona rose from his stool; his devotee continued his chanting until the chief cut it short with a gesture. He was quite a small man, but the glare in his fierce, heavy-lidded eyes pierced even the temple’s stygian gloom.

– So Born-From-Dead has come at last to his god, said Axona, and the words struck a new chill into Flapping Eagle’s heart, because they revealed what the darkness and ceremonial garments had hidden.

The god Axona was an old, dark, hawknosed, feathered woman.

– Born-From-Dead.

The god mouthed his name (ignoring his self-given brave’s name in calculated insult) in tones of overweening disgust.

– All that is Unaxona is Unclean, said the god. Unclean. Had you forgotten, miserable defiled whelp that you are, what that commandment means? Is it to commit sacrilege upon this holy place that you come, whiteskin, paleface, mongrel among the pure, traitor to your race, is it to commit your supreme act of defilement that you come? Born-From-Dead has no patience with Axona; he cannot have come to worship. In death you were born and destruction is your doom. Whatsoever you touch, is soiled; whatsoever you grasp, you break; any person you love is stifled by your love; any person you hate is purified by your loathing. Is it the god Axona herself you seek to destroy? Is it this far that the worm in you has stretched?

She had touched the roots of Flapping Eagle’s own self-doubts; he could barely speak, yet he forced the words from his dry lips. They rustled weakly in the half-light.

– If I can, said Flapping Eagle. I will break you if I can.

Axona laughed, and her cachinnation rang around the room.

– From your own mouth you are condemned, Born-From-Dead, she cried; and it is by your own hand you shall die.

As she sat down once more upon her stool, the devotee, who had lain silent while they spoke, whirled round and cast off his cloak. Again Flapping Eagle’s self-control received a body-blow.

He was gazing into his own eyes.

His own eyes: but a vilely altered representation of himself. The body was the same; and, like Flapping Eagle, the creature wore a single feather in its hair; but the rest of its garnishings were utterly different. He wore a striped single-breasted jacket over a bare chest. The skin was deathly white. Around his waist was a string of beads, from which hung two squares of cloth, a yellow square covering his genitals, a blue square flapping at his buttocks. Otherwise he was quite naked. There were women’s earrings in his ears, women’s redness in his cheeks, women’s lipstick on his lips. His eyebrows were plucked into slender arches and his eyelashes were long and drooping.

And that voice: the unbroken, high, eunuch’s voice, a travesty of his own.

– Come, Born-From-Dead, it said. Come.

In the creature’s right hand was a light axe, or tomahawk. In its left hand was a rifle. Flapping Eagle had no doubt that it was loaded. He also knew that he was helplessly unarmed.

– Come, Born-From-Dead, mocked the voice of Axona, Will you not face my champion? They say you are a great warrior. Come.

Flapping Eagle sighed and came slowly forward.

He was gambling on his surrogate behaving as he would in such a situation, and using the tomahawk before falling back on the simplicity of the rifle. He had always been more at home with the throwing, infighting instruments. So he sauntered in, almost insolently, and thrust his hands into his pockets casually, to irritate his opponent.

His right hand closed over a hard, rounded object. He pulled it out, wondering. It was the Bone of K! The very same Bone that Bird-Dog had flung to him before she disappeared down the tunnel of herself.

The Bone of K: Flapping Eagle lost no time in speculation. He could have thought: where did that come from after all this time? Would it not have been noticed before now? But none of that mattered. He had a weapon, and that changed the nature of the contest. It was now probable that his surrogate would decide on safety and use the rifle. So he had only a few seconds, the brief “freeze” his opponent would undergo when he saw the unexpected object.

Flapping Eagle hurled the Bone, in a single, fluid movement, like throwing a large, ungainly dart. It hit the rifle at the point where his enemy’s hand gripped it. A shriek of pain and the rifle fell to the floor. So did the Bone; it shattered, with results that froze both Flapping Eagle and his alter ego in their tracks.

It was only afterwards that Virgil Jones decoded for Flapping Eagle the secret meaning of the name. It was a cypher whose key was the sound of its secret name:

Os, a bone. K, a place. Hence K-os, the Bone of K. Or, alternatively: Chaos.

At the time Flapping Eagle saw only the terrifying effect of the breaking of tibe Bone.

The shards and splinters rose like a spinning mist from the floor where they shattered and formed a cloud in the centre of the arena of combat. The rifle disappeared completely. It simply ceased to be. So did everything else.

What was left was a hole. A turbulent disarrangement in the structure of the dimension. Chaos.

Flapping Eagle came out of shock a fraction faster than his alter ego; probably because he was further from the hole. He rushed at his adversary head-first and hit him full-tilt in the belly. The surrogate Flapping Eagle staggered, stepped backwards and sideways.

And was gone in the hole, decomposed into chaos, into not-being.

Axona was on her feet, eyes blazing with wrath; but Flapping Eagle knew that behind that anger she was afraid. The Bone, the random element, had foiled her perfect plan; and now she was at his mercy. He advanced upon her with slow deliberation.

– Stay where you are, Unclean, she said, but her voice betrayed her.

– I don’t know what you are, said Flapping Eagle as he walked forward, but when I defile you, I am cleansed of my past. Cleansed of the guilt and shame that possessed some hidden part of my mind, of which your presence is the proof. To free myself, I must render Axona unclean. Do you understand?

He spoke the words with a gentle astonishment, like truths he had just understood.

Then he raped her.

When Skid-Blade returned to the shore where Virgil waited, it carried a new Flapping Eagle. Virgil listened to his account, then said: -You really must do something about your imagination, you know. It’s so awfully lurid.

With the help of Virgil Jones, it wasn’t difficult for Flapping Eagle to extricate himself from the web of Dimension-fever. They constructed their escape simply: Flapping Eagle closed his eyes and, while Virgil danced the Strongdance, willed himself to awake. It was, in the end, as anticlimactic as that, now that the battle was over. Flapping Eagle had become stronger than the inner dimensions.

Long experience, however, adds to strength a certain sensitivity to nuance and wrongnesses; so that as they neared consciousness (as their separate consciousnesses drew closer and closer together, almost touching for an instant, before separating) it was not Flapping Eagle, but Virgil Jones who became aware of a third presence, a third consciousness, also rising.

An instant before the blackout that spanned the fragment of time in which he was restored to himself, Virgil touched the intruder and knew it.

Wakefulness. He was naked, his clothes piled where he left them, on Flapping Eagle’s chest, the greenwood surrounding them, his body still describing the methodical, circular perambulations of the Strongdance. He felt the dead weight of exhaustion in his limbs, but forgot it in his anger.

– Where are you? he shouted. Where?

The “voice” of the unseen Gorf came calm from the woods.

– Greetings, Mr Jones.

Virgil dressed rapidly.

Flapping Eagle awoke with a splitting headache. The words where am I? formed on his lips for the second time on Calf Island; he dismissed them with a wry twist of the mouth. Where is anywhere? he asked himself.

Nevertheless, it was Calf Mountain; the slope of the forested ground told him so. And the cry of the dimensions, for the Effect remained, even though he had mastered it…a nagging in the corners of the eyes, ears and mind. Soon it would become like a mild tintinabulatory infection of the ear; he would become unaware of its presence except in moments of utter stillness. Now, it remained an irritant, niggling at him, a whining reminder of the world’s infinite cavities.

He stood up and found himself alone. A moment of panic; he shouted Virgil’s name into the clearing. Then, collecting himself, he heard the voice in the forest. Virgil’s voice, low and angry. He crept towards the sound with the stealth of his childhood.

In the forest, Virgil Jones was remonstrating with an old acquaintance.

XXVI Out of Order

– AS YOU PERCEIVE, said the “voice” of the Gorf, I stayed.

– The hand of the born interférer, said Virgil, can never resist a superfluous gesture or two.

– Pot and kettle, replied the voice. Mote and beam.

– The acquisition of rudimentary idiom, said Virgil, confers no freedoms. Any intellect which confines itself to mere structuralism is bound to rest trapped in its own webs. Your words serve only to spin cocoons around your own irrelevance.

A thing that happened to Virgil Jones when he was angry: his speech became involuted and obscure. It came of a horror of displaying his loss of self-control. When he was angry, he felt weakest, most easily outwitted; so his speech wound around itself those very cocoons he ascribed to the Gorf.

He was more angry than he could remember. Much of it, he told himself, was reaction. He had put himself through a rigorous physical and mental examination; his very survival had been at risk; it was reasonable, he argued inwardly, for any human being to react overmuch to provocation after all that.

He knew, also, of another thorn. He had felt good on his recent travels; he had felt as he had once felt. Then. Ago. Before. To he plunged from that high confidence into his present weakening choler was intolerable. Which thought only served to make him more angry. The circle was vicious.

The overlarge tongue played about his mouth; a bead of saliva worked its way down to the cleft in his chin; his hands, in the pockets of his crumpled coat, worked feverishly. He sat on a fallen branch of an unknown conifer; it felt rough beneath him. He kicked morosely at a cone, glaring at the invisible creature, as if to scald him with a look.

Silently, crouched behind a clump of trees, Flapping Eagle listened to his guide talking into the void and apparently receiving answers. (The “voice” of the Gorf is only audible to the being it addresses.) He thought: Virgil Jones, there is more to you than meets the eye. And since there was a large quantity of Virgil for any eye to meet, that was a compliment.

The third protagonist sat equably, ten yards or so from Virgil, resting against a tree, his sensory aura quivering slightly. He had had no fears of this confrontation; it had amused him to meet Mr Jones again, and had given him a clue to the final Ordering he was now anxious to discover; but Virgil’s last words rankled, as they were meant to. Irrelevance, indeed.

– Are you aware, Mr Jones, he said haughtily, of my status as an Orderer?

Mr Jones said nothing.

– I see you are, continued the peevish voice. In which case you will no doubt recall the Prime Rule of that noble calling.

Mr Jones looked innocent. Now that he had penetrated the Gorf’s (thick) hide, he felt his own anger cooling.

– Possibly I should remind you, snapped the Gorf. Possibly it will induce you to refrain from these allusions.

– If memory serves, interposed Virgil Jones, the Prime Rule of Order is to eschew all irrelevance. Please correct me if wrong.

There was a brief pause. Then: -You are not wrong, came the reply.

– So, said Virgil Jones, may I be permitted to accuse the Master of a cardinal infringement of his own rules?

This time the silence was aghast.

– Grounds, said the Gorf tersely. Your grounds, please.

– First: that by your intrusion into the personal dimensions of another being, inviolable except in dire emergency, you committed an act not merely irrelevant to those dimensions, but actually dangerous. Even the most skilled of the Masters cannot toy with another’s dimensions without risk. In this case the risk was enormous.

The Gorf said: -If you believe I meant him harm, you underestimate my skill. Having intuited his role, as a participant in the Final Ordering, it would be grossly bad play to distort that Ordering by a wilful act. I merely set him a puzzle to deepen his knowledge of the dimensions. Consider: if I had not done so, if he had fought off the fever instantly, he would never have conquered his monsters. How can this be irrelevance?

Virgil considered.

– There’s some truth in that, he said. But we don’t know if he needed to overcome those monsters. Now that it has happened as it happened, even he will say he did. But he might not have, had it been otherwise. Your defence rests on an unproveable first principle.

– The onus of proof rests with you, came the answer.

Virgil returned to the attack.

– Second: that, having no place whatsoever in the Final Ordering of the Island, you have been irrelevant ever since you perceived that fact, and stayed. There is no reason for you being here; the Island did not include you in its conception, so by your own rules it would be a distortion if it were to use you in any Ordering process. Nor do we have any need of observers. What do you say to that?

The silence lasted for several minutes. (Flapping Eagle, eavesdropping on half the eerie debate, half-thought it was over). Then the Gorfs voice sounded, slow and heavy.

– That was the correct move, Mr Jones. You should not have let your irritation get the better of your judgement at first. The first was a wasted move, which deprives you of perfection. Nevertheless, a score is a score. A score is a score. A score is a score. A score is a score. A score is a score.

The phrase, monotonously repeated, was burdened with a world of defeat. Virgil, suddenly sympathetic, asked:

– Master, if you knew, why did you stay?

– You must not call me Master. A Master would not have done it.

– A Master did, said Virgil. I should like to know his reasons.

Simply, the Gorf replied:

– I liked it here.

Virgil thought of the planet Thera. Bleak. Empty. He understood how this hugely intelligent being would prefer the complex order of Calf Island.

– Master, he said finally, I must ask you to leave now.

The Gorfs voice was fierce. Defiant.

– I will not leave. I will stay.

– Then, said Virgil tiredly, his body aching with fatigue, I shall have to Order you away.

Something like a hollow laugh came from the void. -I am not that far gone, said the Gorf. You scored only because of my perverse infringement of the rules. You could not win an Ordering contest.

Flapping Eagle saw Virgil stand up. He covered his face with his hands, and an extraordinary thing happened: he seemed to grow. Not in height. Not in width.

In depth.

The only phrase that seemed to fit had a curious second meaning.

He added several dimensions to himself.

Flapping Eagle thought: it seems we each must fight a battle; but I was ready and Virgil is weak. And his opponent has chosen the ground.

Virgil was thinking along similar lines; but was very pleased at his continuing reawakening. The dimensions seemed his to visit again, after all this time, after all. That. Pain.

He turned to face the Gorf.

– Mr Jones, said the Gorf. A word of warning before the contest. In case you should win.

– Yes? said Virgil. (Was this a delaying tactic?)

– I am not the only irrelevance on the island, Mr Jones. I fear you are another.

Virgil said nothing, but he knew the Gorf had succeeded in wounding him. This renaissance of his was a fragile thing. Doubts assailed it easily.

– Just an intuition, Mr Jones, said the disembodied voice. I rather fancy you will take little part in the final Ordering. Truly. It gives a certain symmetry to this contest, wouldn’t you say?

– Let’s get on with it, barked Virgil Jones.

To the watching Flapping Eagle, it appeared that there followed a period of complete inactivity. Not being versed in the Outer Dimensions, he could not enter the battlefield. Virgil Jones stood frozenly, head bowed, arms outstretched, hands splayed, like a man pushing against a very heavy door. Then, without warning, he collapsed. Inert matter in a heap on the forest floor.

Flapping Eagle rushed forward.

Virgil Jones came round slowly.

– Shouldn’t have bothered, he said. No contest, really. Not a hope. Flea trying to rape an elephant. Couldn’t Order him back. Not in a million years. It’s his game.

– Where is he? asked Flapping Eagle, looking around.

– Who knows, said Virgil. Doesn’t matter. Won’t trouble us again. I won that point, anyway. And then, in a brave attempt at lightheartedness, he said: -Who will rid me of this meddlesome Gorf?

Something had gone out of Virgil Jones’ face. His defeat had drained him of a great deal more than energy. He seemed to Flapping Eagle now as he had first seemed: shambling, bumbling, ineffectual. The decisive figure of the Inner Dimensions had gone, nursed once more behind a skin of failure.

– Virgil, said Flapping Eagle. Virgil. Thank you.

Virgil Jones snorted.

And fainted.

The roles of nurse and patient were reversed.

XXVII Terror

ONCE. THEN. AGO. Before. The terror of the titties, I. They came easily into my hands. They came. Easily. Gently does it, though some like it rough. Gently to the peaks of pleasure. Softly to the peaks of pain. Breasts like twin peaks, they had then, mountains yielding to the touch. Mine. Sweet things. What things they are. A randy bugger, then. All organs decay through disuse. Pulled out all the stops, then. Let me have it, Virgie! Give and take, give and take, pingpong of bodies possessed. O, Virgil, you know how to please. Please… pleas, they pleaded and I kneaded their soft volcanoes. I needed their soft. A virgin, eh? My name’s Virgil. What’s one consonant between friends? That worked once. Then. Birds. The coo of a turtledove in my ear as it nibbled and the quake of the great turtle itself as we came. Then. Before. Ah, a bird-fancier, I, no fancier bird than I. Ornithology’s no substitute for sex. Feathers go best in a bed, in a pillow, under the bouncing bodies. All I could wish for, more wishing for me than I wished for, squeeze me, please, me! Once. Then. Ago. Go anywhere, inside, outside, fornication never changes. Odd. The pleasure principle transcends all boundaries. Contraception stretches into a million different places, different worlds, different techniques, vive la difference, I was there, where the pill was, my skill was, where the coil, my toil, and they came. Easily. In my hand. Once. Then. Ago. Before. Liv.

Drink this, Virgil. Water from the stream.

Eat this, Virgil, berries from the tree.

Rest now, Virgil, don’t talk, rest. Sleep. It heals.

Guilt. My fault. Mea maxima. Sorry I spoke. Sorry I moved. Sorry I lived. Sorry. On my knees. Forgive me. Liv. Forgive. It rhymes. Or accurately. Leev. Relieve. She was always Liv to me, her name married to sieve and give as she was wife to me. Ah the terror of her titties. Terrible beautiful white. I scaled them and fell. The strong do not forgive the weak. Their. Lessness. Brightly we burned like any star, brighter than brightest, my moth to her flame, I was scalded and fell. The heat is cruel to the hike. Warm. Toad, she said and I croaked. Go, she said and I went. In terror of the titties. Then. But. Before. Daughter of the Rising Son, I thought she loved me. In the house of pleasure and I paid in kindness. So kind, she said, so kind, I thought she loved me. Love grows and swallows its love, digests and spits it out. Seared by the gastric juices of her loving. Sorry. Liv. From the house of rising suns to the black hole, hole-black house, your rise and partial fall. Bitterness succeeding your pride, I’m sorry. She’d ruffle my hair, one day she tore a handful from the root. Dark lady with the fair skin fair hair fair eyes so fair and so unfair and yet so fair. Fire in her to burn a man, ice in her to heal him. I was not the man. For. Her. Liv, ice-peak of perfection, how she cast me off, how sorry I…mea, maxima, thing. Then. Ago. Before. The strong do not forgive. The weak their lessness.

XXVIII Afterwards

– LIV WAS MY wife, said Virgil, sitting up at the edge of the clearing, propped against a tree. She should have had a stronger man.

Flapping Eagle had already decided never to pry further into Virgil than he was willing to reveal; he had no wish to bring him pain. So he asked no questions about Liv.

– I remember K, mused Virgil absently, when they first came. To settle, to marry, to whore. And one or two… went a bit further.

– Like Grimus? asked Flapping Eagle sharply.

– Well, said Virgil, pursing his lips, I don’t know if I do.

– What?

– Like Grimus.

Even in his frustration, Flapping Eagle had to laugh.

– You’re certainly well again, he said, if you can perpetrate jokes like that.

– My dear fellow, said Virgil. It was no joke.

– I know, said Flapping Eagle, still laughing. Small pleasantry.

Virgil shrugged.

– Virgil, repeated Flapping Eagle, who or what is he? Grimus.

– Yes, said Virgil Jones.

– A sad fact, said Virgil Jones as they climbed. One’s environment is a great deal more epic than oneself. Events may be epic: people rarely are. Which is why they find such an environment appalling. I once mentioned to you that I was superstitious because this was a place where anything could happen; I’m sure you understand what I meant now. But there’s another reaction. It is this: if anything can happen, we’d better make damn sure it never does.

– You mean like Dolores, said Flapping Eagle.

Virgil did not answer.

XXIX Deggle

– BUGGER, SAID NICHOLAS DEGGLE.

He was standing on Calf Beach, having arrived through the “gate” he had despatched Flapping Eagle through two weeks earlier; and he was feeling very angry with himself, and, therefore, with the universe. He had made a mistake so elementary it was mind-defying: he had failed to consider where on Calf Island the gate would deposit him, and as a result, here he was, the wrong side of the Forest, with a mountainful of climbing to do.

Of course he should have worked it out: since the gate was at sea-level that would have been its logical exit-point. Except that in all the setting he had done with his wand, the Stem, he had aimed at a point above K; and he had blithely assumed that that must have been where Flapping Eagle had gone, once the passage of the days had made it clear that the gate had worked. He was, he told himself bitterly, an unadulterated fool; and then he put the thought from him; too much had to be done to waste time on self-criticism.

No point in trying to use the gate the other way, back to X, and then re-angling it; it was clear that the Stem was an unreliable setter, and it had taken him years to get this far. Besides, the gate was only a one-way affair: again a function of time. No point, either, in attempting to use the Stem to move him up the mountain; again, its unreliability might land him anywhere, perhaps in a worse situation than he was. There was nothing for it: he’d have to climb.

– Bugger, he repeated. His long, willowy frame was not meant for such physical labour; the very thought of it led his tongue forcibly into profanity.

He cheered himself up with a vision of the reaction of Grimus-and indeed Jones-when they discovered that he was back. Back, he said aloud to the beach. Back to do what he should have done so long ago, and what they had prevented him from doing. This time he’d make sure they didn’t.

Now he noticed that he was not alone on the beach. A woman sat some way from him, on the sands, beside an empty rocking-chair, gazing fixedly at the cliffs. He knew that rocking-chair; it belonged to Virgil Jones. He knew the woman, too: there could not be two women on Calf Island as ugly as O’Toole’s wife. Here was a mystery, then. He sauntered over to Dolores; she sang on, toothlessly, ignoring him.

– Mrs O’Toole? he asked.

Dolores stopped singing and turned slowly to look at him.

– Darling, she said, do sit down.

Darling? thought Deggle; but he was feeling tired, so he did seat himself in Jones’ chair.

Virgil, thought Dolores. The lilting voice in the baggy face. The soaring heart in the sagging body. Virgil, who took her from the soulless church-wax and gave her flesh. How lucky she was to have him.

– Virgil, she said aloud, taking pleasure in his name. Virgil Jones.

Deggle was watching her. -Is he here? he said, eyes piercing her.

– As always, she said, clutching at his hand. Virgil is here.

Deggle disengaged his hand with delicate loathing.

– Are you… his woman? he asked.

She looked up at him adoringly and sang in her awful voice:

– Till all the seas run dry, my love.

Deggle found the cracked old woman’s rendition of the song unaccountably hilarious. Between giggles he said:

– Quite a change from Liv, aren’t you, Mrs O’Toole?

– Nothing changes, said Dolores O’Toole. Does it, darling?

– I suppose not, said Deggle, to fill the expectant silence. She smiled happily.

– O Virgil, she said to the recoiling Deggle, I do, do love you.

Deggle made a quick decision.

– I love you too, he said, and fought back a wave of nausea.

– Let’s go home, she said. Time for breakfast. Give me your belt.

– My belt? Deggle almost squeaked.

– O, you are fussy, she said. Come on, now.

Blankly, Deggle handed her his belt. Unlike Virgil, he didn’t need it to hold his trousers up. Also unlike Virgil, he wasn’t fat; so his belt wasn’t long enough.

– I think I’ll manage without it today, said Dolores O’Toole composedly.

Nicholas Deggle, half-amused, half-frightened by the old madwoman, followed her up the cliff-path to the little hovel. I wonder what happened to Virgil Jones, he asked himself.

Later that day.

Dolores O’Toole was boiling up some arrowroot tea when Deggle came in, looking dishevelled, and even gloomier than he had when he arrived.

– Wherever have you been, my love? she asked. Have some root-tea.

He had been up the mountain a small way. Then he had heard it: the deadly whine. At first he had ignored it; then it became increasingly intrusive, and the dizziness came, and the sense of detachment. Fortunately for himself, Nicholas Deggle was a man of some presence of mind and had staggered and rolled down the mountain, out of the danger zone. Then (for he could recognize an effect of the Rose when he experienced it) he cursed Grimus silently and long.

– Root-tea, said Dolores O’Toole, giving him a bowl. It was revolting; in his anger he hurled the bowl to the floor, where it shattered.

– Tch, tch, said Dolores. Accidents will happen. She began to mop up the mess, uncomplaining.

When she had finished, she came to him and sat at his feet. He was in the rocking-chair again. -We’ll sit like this, she said, every tea-time, for ever.

– You know, said Nicholas Deggle, you could easily be quite right.

– You were clever to chase away the ghost, she said, full of admiration.

– What ghost? asked Deggle.

– O, don’t be falsely modest. You know. That Spectre of Grimus with the scar on its chest.

– Ah, said Deggle, that ghost.

Jones had obviously gone somewhere with Flapping Eagle; but where? Had they killed each other? Had they been mad enough to try and get through the Effect?

– One thing is certain, he told himself, if Flapping Eagle doesn’t get to Bird-Dog and then do what I was going to do, I’m stuck here for life. With a hag who loves me because she thinks I’m Virgil Jones. He wondered if Virgil Jones would see the joke.

He doubted it; because he didn’t see it, either.

He was asleep on the rush-mat carefully laid down for him by Mrs O’Toole, when a nudge jerked him fully awake. There was Dolores O’Toole, in the nude, her hump looming up behind her, her withered breasts swaying with her breathing, her face lit by a ghastly invitation, her lips snarling a smile.

– O God, said Deggle, and closed his eyes to think of the Empire. He opened them; she was still there, leering at him.

– Not tonight, Josephine, he begged.

– Dolores, she corrected affectionately and went back to bed.

Nicholas Deggle was perspiring heavily.

XXX Valhalla

– VALHALLA, SAID VIRGIL JONES.

Valhalla: where dead warriors live on in stark splendour, fighting their past battles daily, reliving the hour of glory in which they fell, falling bloodied once more to the gleaming floors and being renewed the next morning to resume the eternal combat. Valhalla, the hall of fame, the living museum of the heroism of the past. Valhalla, close to the pool of knowledge where Odin drank, shaded by the Great Ash Yggdrasil, the World-Tree. When the ash falls, so does Valhalla.

With a slyly amused flick of the tongue, Virgil was pointing at the town of K.

The ascent of the mountain had posed no problems once Virgil had regained his strength (though not his vigour); and now Flapping Eagle stood beside his guide at the very fringe of the forested slopes, looking across a surprisingly large plain.

It was as though a vast step had been cut into the side of Calf Mountain. Flapping Eagle, appreciating the mountain’s true shape for the first time, found himself imagining a giant, using the island as a step up from sea to sky. On the flat horizontal of the step lay the town of K, hard up against the renewed mountain-wall. Fields took up the rest of the plain, some with herds of cattle, others of sheep; still others grew wheat and other crops. But it was night now and the fields were still. Farmhouses dotted the plain, glowing like worms in a garden.

Above the town, on an outcrop of the mountain, stood a single house. Its walls, in direct opposition to the whitewash uniform worn by the rest of the town, were black as jet. It was invisible now, showing no lights; but Virgil Jones knew it was there. It was Liv’s house.

Above it, the mountain’s peak was hidden in a wall of cloud.

– It never lifts, said Virgil Jones, and then silence resumed.

Flapping Eagle had not forgotten his vow to himself in that inner dimension; he would abandon his search and make his life here, if he could. So here was an end to centuries of wandering, a methuselah age of following blindly where the moving finger led. He should have felt relief; but only tension came. For any man, it is a hard thing to empty the mind of all its aims and substitute a new set, cleanly, just so; for Flapping Eagle, whose aims had been set, like one of those inner dimensions, for seven hundred years, it was an herculean task.

Virgil Jones, too, was making plans, and plans which involved Flapping Eagle at that. For now, now that he had brought Flapping Eagle to K, was the crucial time. If he should react to it (and it to him) as Virgil hoped, he would be ready for the task Virgil wished him to perform. If not, then there was nothing to be done. Virgil no longer had the strength to approach Grimus. He had had a glimpse of it, there in the forest; but it had been ruined once more, in his struggle with the Gorf. Now it was up to Flapping Eagle. Virgil derived some dark amusement from the fact that he was planning exactly what Deggle would have wished; that would amuse Master Nicholas, too, if he knew. If there were no god, we should have to invent one, remembered Virgil, and made this reversal of that aphorism:

since there is a Grimus, he must be destroyed.

This, then, was a return to a long-lost war. There would be O’Toole to face, and possibly even Liv. But there was no going back.

– Flapping Eagle, he said, I’d like to tell you this: we are all most vulnerable to the ones we love.

Flapping Eagle was only half-listening. Virgil went on, gazing into the night-mist lying lightly over the plain, giving the town itself a shimmering, insubstantial air.

– I mean yourself, said Virgil. I hope you will not end by causing me pain. I really am very vulnerable to any wounds you may care to inflict. That, it appears to me, is what a friendship means.

Flapping Eagle was listening now. Virgil had spoken haltingly; the words had been hard to say. They were a plea for help, a cry of need from a man who had now saved his life twice.

– Agreed, he said. Virgil nodded briefly.

They had been at the woods’ end for some time now. Night was well under way.

– Well, said Virgil Jones, shall we?

On an impulse, Flapping Eagle linked his left arm around Virgil’s right; and they marched, in step, comrades-in-arms, towards their separate dooms.

The moon, filtering faintly through the mist, shed white flecks on their moving heads.