Quiller Salamander

20: SKULLS

There are snakes in the river.

My spine arched again to a spasm and I lay like that, curved against the earth with my face to the sky, lay like that for I didn't know how long, the sweat pouring from me.

They swim across at night — the light attracts them, and the rats.

I slumped again like a drawn bow snapping, and the fever began. I had been expecting it.

Especially the hanuman — do you know it? The bright green one, quite small but more deadly thane cobra, even the king cobra.

Another spasm struck and I became arched, drawn taut, powerless to move, to relax the muscles. It was beginning to be difficult now to breathe, so I dragged at the air, sucked at it, but nothing happened. If the voluntary muscles were to be affected, so would the involuntary muscles, including those of the heart. I waited, with the moon swimming in the slits between my lids, and then the drawn nerves snapped again and my shoulders hit the earth.

Were there more of those things here? Did that one have a mate, and if so, how far was it from where I was lying? I couldn't do with more, with more than one. They are more deadly than the cobra.

One simply has to relax. Khay, the late Captain Khay. Western people drink whole bottle of whisky, sometimes works. Meditation best.

Soon after this — hours? I didn't know — the shaking began, and the delirium.

There were nine moons when the storm came roaring into the jungle and I counted them as the trees bent low under the force of the whipping wind, nine in a circle, circling, a giddy-go-round of white-lit moons, spinning in the night as the head rolled, lolled, shaking itself, was shaken by the fever as the sweat sprang and I shouted something, shouted at the storm, shuddering, hands, fingers clawing at the soft moist fibres, bringing them to the mouth to eat, hungering for remembered motions, eating, running — staggering up and lurching and then crashing down again, singing like a drunk as the storm howled through the leaves and blew away the circle of moons and there was just the dark and I lay blinded, whirled in the deep spinning vortex of the night.

Pain was there, and this comforted me: the nerves were not yet numbed, could still serve the organism. The pain was in the left hand, wrist, arm, burning, as if I'd plunged them into fire. I got onto my feet again and flayed my arm around, filling the dark with flames, touching the trees until they too took fire and the storm sent sparks flying, seized the flames and hurled them in hot bright banners as I stood dazzled, reeling under the heat, the eyes seared, the mouth open and filled with coals, roaring like a dragon, bellowing flames.

Meditate, he, the man with the unremembered name, had said.

Crashing to the earth with the legs buckling, lying across a creeper, a long thin — oh Jesus Christ I can't do with more of — a thin, unmoving creeper, let go then, and meditate, fear nothing and fear not fear, reach for the silence, the stillness, the domain of the unified field, of universal consciousness and love, let go, let go, and drift into the void where everything is nothing, and nothing everything, let go.

But this halcyon respite has not been for long, has it, our good friend, for we are running again — running? — lurching, we mean, lurching and staggering and hitting trees, pitching down and crawling until the thought of the thin green hanuman catapults us to our feet again and we reel onward through the crashing dark, the moon down now, the nine moons down, is this venom always lethal? tell us, pray, are we a goner, done for, is this the Styx we're drowning in as we goad ourselves through the jungle night? Then for what purpose, for God's sake?

To find the bullock track.

A ray of sanity there, my masters, there's thought left somewhere in the fevered brain, squealing like a rat on fire for attention, the bullock track, yea, verily, in the name of the salamander: the bullock track and the road to Pouthisat and London, you must be out of your bloody mind, the veins are full of that thing's venom and the nerves are running riot, never mind the salamander, the first thing is to perpetuate life, carry this charred and ember-bright organism through the burning dark, east by the polar star glimpsed here and there through the endless canopy of leaves; listen to the thoughts still left in the smouldering consciousness and let them be thy guide, world without end as we fall again, fall down again, and this time we do not, we can not get up, so destroyed are we in this unholy fire, a shred of blackened bone and gristle and hollow, echoing despair, God rest ye here, my most unmerry gentleman, and offer the relics of thy substance to the earth.

Skulls grinning at me, into my face as the cold light creeps through the sugar palms. Skulls, lined up in orderly rows, in serried ranks of bone-white laughter.

But these are real.

I know this.

And then there is darkness again, and in the darkness movement, a lifting, a bearing away, and in the wan light of morning a face leans over mine, smiling. An arm raises my shoulders, and a voice sounds.

'Drink.'