Kippa was still rendered immobile, unable to take his eyes away from the approaching demon. The blade made a great, circular arc, an elaborate matador flourish that had none of the surgical precision of its previous use. On its upward swing, it cut between the youth’s legs, severing his budding manhood and sending him, toppling and screeching, out of the deliberate path of the living, grinning nightmare called Sidrus.
It crawled across the floor on all fours, its long, white proboscis sniffing, whiskers quivering as it nodded from side to side. Its rangy, pale legs seemed to both tiptoe and slide on the polished wooden floor. The top part of its body was clothed in a green, silken skin, which caught the garish light from the blazing flambeaux on the balcony outside the windows. The lower half of its body was naked, its huge, swollen phallus swaying like an independent entity as the creature approached its next engagement. The last bed was in great disarray, the covers pulled messily around the softly snoring body of its spent occupant. The room was full of whispers and laughter; small, animal noises of hunger and fulfilment rippled the landscape of opulence. Sighs gilded the tangled scent of incense, musk and intoxication.
It reached the next bed and slid its gloved hands beneath the sheet. They were instantly gripped by the smooth, trembling grasp of the woman who waited there. She pulled the beast inside and drew the covers over them both. Her form was older, large and voluptuous, and she too had a distorted face, in the shape of an owl, black feathers accentuating the ivory wideness of her eyes. He slipped a catch on his beak and pulled it backwards, leaving the lower half of his face exposed, so that his mouth was visible and active in their lovemaking. Pulling him close, she kissed him passionately. He jumped back, startled, almost falling from the bed. Neither Luluwa nor Ghertrude had ever done such a thing; it had never been explained to him, and Ghertrude had always looked away when they mated.
The stranger drew him closer still. ‘Don’t be shy,’ she said.
He let her suck his mouth again, and it was sweet and arousing. He kissed back, and his manhood surpassed previous dimensions and expectations.
Even in the over-populated room of revellers, the sounds of the owl and her new companion arose above all others. Their bedding thrashed wildly, and something else wallowed out from their conjunctures; other couples and trios found their attention hooked and pulled across the pulsing darkness, away from their own compacted intimacies, peering towards an unnameable eminence that was outside and beyond their own little shudders and sighs.
It was almost dawn when he crept from her bed to search the rooms for his black velvet cloak.
When the owl awoke, she began to cry. She pulled her mask away and started to shout. She stumbled to the window, her hands on her face, and began to scream.
The owl was called Cyrena Lohr. She was thirty-three years old, and had been blind since birth. In the early light of post-carnival, with anxious friends and strangers standing by her side, she shivered, naked and overpowered at the window, watching the brilliant sunrise, yellow and crisp on her first visual day.
How had he done this? Who was this miracle worker who had entered her bed and given her sight? She had to find him. The moment she could be sure she was not dreaming, she would find him and thank him on her knees.
The remaining revellers in her mansion were dressing quickly. One brought a dressing gown and wrapped Cyrena in its warm folds, while attempting to steer the emotional woman away from the window and back to the bed. But she would not be moved, so they brought her a high-backed armchair and seated her safely within it. Most of the crowd that had occupied her many rooms had disappeared; the combination of unmasking and being a witness was too much for their frail identities to bear, and they had fled as the whisper slithered through the house. Miracles are never comfortable; for the hungover, the debauched and the anonymous, they are intolerable.
Four weeks later, she had settled with her sight. All available tests had been completed, and it was unanimously agreed: she had excellent and enduring vision.
With the help of various companions, she spent two of those weeks visiting the city she knew so intimately, adding colour, shape and tone to its sound and texture. She stared for hours at the faces of her friends and the few of her family who were left. The new details were catching up and beginning to make sense. Only her dreams remained slow and auditory; the pictures came, but would not attach properly, flopping and draping over the hard skeletons of sound and becoming transparent. It would take a year for them to solidify into trust.
She redecorated her splendid house. She gave all her old clothes to the poor, and went on a lavish spending spree to dress her body in the rich colour and sumptuous design of her wildest imaginings. She burnt her white sticks, unceremoniously, in the gardener’s fire, the sweet scent of leaf smoke disguising their brittle stink of anguish. And then she focused her zeal on finding him – to become his devoted acolyte, or to make him her own.
His jaw was sewn back on. Tufts of greasy twine stuck out of it in all directions. It no longer moved, and he could not chew or talk. But that could all be fixed later; now, he just had to stay sharp, and kill the Bowman before he ever touched another arrow.
Tsungali waited before the bridge and the mill, high in the rocks, where he had been before. He knew his prey had to come this way to find passage through the damned forest. He held the Enfield in an awkward grip. The first arrow had severed three of the tendons in his right arm, so that two of his fingers no longer worked with any predictability. But this time, he would make no mistake: a closer shot, backed up by the stump-barrelled shotgun, would finish the job.
He had not dared show his wrecked face at the inn; he wondered if those other assassins still lurked there. He knew they would come running at his shots, and in his present weakness those jackals might even take his quarry away, claiming the kill as their own. He did not have the agility for a silent kill, or the strength to fight off three or four strong and armed assailants; all he had was time and cunning, so he laid traps around his planned killing zone, and waited.
It wasn’t long before his attention was rewarded, but he had not expected to see two men walking together. They came along the river road arm in arm, a little tipsy and unsure of foot, one black man and one white. The white man was talking loudly, his associate appearing to nod in approval. Neither carried weapons.
Tsungali had never seen his target clearly, could not know the details of his face or dress. But he knew him to be a loner, and unlikely to be in cahoots with this drunken Negro, so he did not make the shot or stop them on their way to the inn.
They passed below him, and he carefully, quietly stood to catch a glimpse of their faces. He instantly recognised Tugu Ossenti, and the expression on his face revealed that he was not drunk, but grievously hurt. He looked at the loud, laughing face of the white man and saw no mirth: it was a face that could not be, a face that he knew too well. He saw the bow, concealed behind his back, and swung his shotgun down onto the ill-matched pair, sending a loose skree falling in his tilted swivel. As he fired, the white man lifted Ossenti like a puppet, raising him up by his armpit, where the dagger had pierced and guided his pretend drunken walk. The black man screamed before the first barrel removed the back of his head, the second crashing into his broad back. The white man shrugged the twitching carcass to one side, and tucked himself swiftly beneath the rocky shelf where Tsungali stood, out of his sight and out of the reach of his gun.
After the booming roar, the valley fell quiet. Birds stopped singing and the breeze held its breath. A door banged somewhere in the mill, and another figure scanned the scene for the next move, before retreating to a safer, hidden place. All stayed motionless until nightfall, then evaporated into the dark, skins crawling with potential attack. Their next meeting would be in the forest: it had been inevitable all along. Nothing could deflect the viciousness of its defined fate.