The Erstwhile watched on, dismayed by the imposter’s barbarous arrogance. His disconnection of self, for such a short time, was a small price to pay for entrance to these sacred lands and they stayed afar, wanting no contact with the trespassing stranger. If they could have hoped, then it would have been for beasts to devour him, or for lesser men to emerge and gnaw on his godless, selfish bones. But morning found him safe and intact and, when the first warmth touched his face, he peeled his protections away, pushed the canoe back into the water and headed upstream, his stomach growling until breakfast.
Rumours tend to spread like ripples, circular waves moving out from a point of incident. In cities, they stop for a moment when they reach the outer walls, especially when the city in question is circular. Against those arcs of fact and protection, they are questioned, the hard litmus of stone, straw and lime interrogating their origin and validity, in the same way as those who camp outside, dreaming of entrance and stability, are made to prove their origins. If the story stands, it is filtered to the outside world in muted or fragmented form.
When the miracle of the carnival reached the dispossessed and the injured who sulked in the shadow of the walls, a great stench of hope rose up, its heat cooking the story and causing a bubbling at the gates. That was when they started to arrive at Cyrena’s home. Not having the nerve to knock at the lofty door, they loitered outside her garden walls, hoping for a sight, if sight was in them, of the blessed lady, believing that proximity might affect their damaged condition, that radiance might mend.
Chalky and his sister had found their way there hand in hand, begging their path to the ivy-covered wall. They carried white sticks, but, unlike those that Cyrena had so recently burnt, theirs had been cut each year from the forest and painted white by their father. Chalky’s eyes had been taken by flies when he was a child. They had crawled over him from the moment he’d left the womb, suckering and sweeping his sweaty skin, before leaving their eggs buried in his pupils at the age of three. It was not a rare occurrence in the village where he was born, but outside, on the road to the city, it prompted pity from passing travellers, and a slight income appeared in his father’s life.
Exactly how his sister had gone blind was unknown. It had been sudden, having taken place in the middle of the night; all she remembered was the pain and the feeling that she was being held down, tangled in her gripping, sleeping sheet. Since then they had travelled the viable road together, bringing in an even larger revenue for the insatiable old man. The picture of them hand in hand, foraging by the busy track, would melt the hearts of travellers and prise open their usually reluctant purses. Their father did not know they were here; he assumed they were stopping the traffic outside the city with their tragic appearance, not in it, standing at the door of miracle.
The story they had heard told of a grand lady who invited blind people to her home during carnival. The house had been bursting with them; the rattle and tap of their sticks could be heard outside, like the beaks of storks sounding from the rooftops. Perhaps she might make an exception outside of carnival time for two so young and needy?
They arrived to find others lurking below the wall, sense depleted and seeking supernatural intervention in their grubby, alienated lives. Chalky, filled with the courage of lost hope, tapped gently on the garden door. His approach was answered by a deafening explosion of glass, as if some terrible, angry weapon of water and crystal had erupted on the other side of the wall. His sister clutched his hand and they staggered quickly from the scene, in fear of such a reply, or of being blamed for the calamity that had just so violently transpired. Most of the crowd ran with them, leaving only a few behind to watch the sudden exodus in surprise. They were the deaf ones.
Dusk and the benediction of shadow were coming back, but not for the Erstwhile, who had become too old. When the sun went away, they creaked and cracked, crawling on the forest floor and hanging sloth-like from the trees. There was no cave or simple dwelling for them. They did not have the pleasures of men, or the ability to make and change what was around them. They had each forgotten their purpose and the details of their design, how they had come to roam the ancient wood. But they all had longing, and it was attached to the actions of humans.
Their lightweight skeletons of spun coral and honey had absorbed the densities of water and time; now, heavier than bone, they filled their sluggish bodies with despair. Where feathers and light might once have been, there now grew vines and rough, scarred bark. Some had assumed coverings of fur or scales to keep their endless life forces protected.
Their unions with women had occurred thousands of years earlier, the resonant orgasm bleaching their voices and their sense of direction. Those that had mated were the ones that had been left behind with Adam, and with those that had been called the Watchers. Now derelict, their purpose and their application had washed away to rumour and ache. They roamed, pilfered and scratched a life in utter, total substance. Their ambition was to become invisible, to waste away into mist and breeze. But that too had been lost. Their given task was to protect the tree of knowledge, and so they remained in the forest, slowly becoming a forgotten part of it.
In previous times, a few had crept out, making short, scavenging journeys to the city. Fewer still had stayed away, to sleep with the Rumour, the name that they had given all those humans and semi-humans after Adam, to twin with them in attempts to understand. They were chosen for the task, to go to places full of the Rumours, where land and time had been cultivated in scratched, straight lines and chopped, mean patches.
Aside from the chosen few, it was forbidden for any others to trespass the places of Rumour; the species carried such a virulent contagion and misunderstanding of knowledge, that even God’s name was slutted by it. No one knew of the Erstwhile’s journeys to Essenwald until they pillaged the chapel of the Desert Fathers. They should have been pitied, or sympathised with, but that was not the nature of men-turned-Rumour, who could not be blamed for following their own righteous teachings.
The Erstwhile had broken into the little church to look at the paintings. Without strength or tools, they had rubbed repeatedly at a patch in the wall, gradually wearing it away a little more each night, until eventually they were able to squeeze through and crawl about in the clean, closed darkness. Such an enclosure was beyond their understanding; its straight lines and solid walls confused them with wonder and fear. Like an insect at a glass window, everything there contradicted the laws and form of their existence.
They crept and flapped through the mystifying unity of out and in. When they came to the paintings, they froze. They stood, whimpering, before the framed print and the thick, black icon, shuddering and shaking in great swathes of a moment, until they were stumbled upon the next morning by the young priest. They paid no attention to his presence, and he was oblivious to theirs, until he walked directly into them at the far side of the church. He dropped his box of waxy candle-ends in shock, and yelped as he fell to the floor under the draft of their exit.