When he stepped free from the courthouse and into the cheering crowd, it had been a sanctified rebirth. Friends and strangers held him up, helped him walk limply home; after only a few steps, he had heard the white, death-faced voices of the singing circle and begun to understand the significance of the Ghost Dance. He slowed and twisted around, weak in the arms of his helpers, to look back at the crowd at the foot of the courthouse steps – they milled and revelled, picking their hats up from the dusty street where they had landed only moments before, a jubilant and temporary resting place after being cast into the air of his triumph.
The sun was fierce that day, and the bald cliff stood clear of the great mass of the forest; like a hermitage in a mythical painting, it shone pale gold against the greens and blacks of the trees. The sky was heroically blue, with vast, rolling, white clouds which seemed to move in all directions in the light breeze.
The Bowman had scrabbled over the broken terrain for two days before finding the cave, though the notion of having ‘found’ it seemed inaccurate, somehow; he had felt drawn to it by an ungovernable magnetism which seemed to turn his every step; that weak force, which holds every star and cell in check, had tilted him towards the crack in the rock.
He pulled himself over the last ledge and surveyed the landscape in all directions; the Vorrh seemed to go on forever. He wiped the sweat from his eyes and moved into the mouth of the cave, its coolness overwhelming. Light, shafting in through fissures in the high ceiling above, gave it a church-like atmosphere that suggested sanctum and calm. The sense of having been here before overcame him; he knew this place. Then the bow moved in his hand. At first he thought a gust of wind had caught it, but it moved again, twitching like a divining rod sniffing at water.
He dropped all of his other possessions and held the bow firmly between his two hands. The inexplicable movement steered him with tiny twitches along its length, twitches that united to make a pull. He went with it further into the cave. It guided his growing excitement to a point at the back of the third chamber. There, a rock seemed to mark the spot that the bow was pointing to. He brushed dust and wind-flung twigs off the stone and gasped at the pictograph inscribed crudely onto its surface, a semi-circle, struck through its middle by a slender, pointed dart: a bow and arrow.
He rolled the stone aside and started to dig, scraping at the compacted earth with his hands and the large knife he carried at his side. After twenty minutes, and a forearm’s depth of excavation, he struck something solid. He swept the earth around it to reveal a heavy, wooden box. With some difficulty, he freed it from the tight, stony earth, stopping to take several deep breaths before forcing the lid off. It prised free to reveal a heavy parcel and a scrawled note. The words were written in a familiar hand. It read:
You and I are Peter Williams. I already have little memory, so I am writing these words from Este’s dictation. You will find this after she has died and become the bow of your arm. You are returning to whence you came, from the other side of the Vorrh. You are now midway. Many will try to stop you; some will attempt to take your life. You must be vigilant and sly. Este is the only one to travel with us, the only one you can trust. She led me out of the lands of struggle when blood poured. We lived here in this cave for a year, and then moved on to start a new life. It was heaven, but it was waiting for hell. She saw it all and our place in it. Your returning is to balance the dead that will follow. Este sends all her love from our time, to you, and her present. I leave you a little something from before, a dragon that will stop some of the monsters, and a memory from the village that will let you hear us and the others from afar.
God speed.
You.
He stared at the paper for a long while, and then started to shake. The air in the cave seemed to adopt his agitation, so that all things except the letter trembled into a blur. Something like fury and torpur were wrestling inside his shock, and his eyes closed to watch his opposites tear and scratch at each other. His body was in spasm, the muscles clenching hard, as if to defy the turbulence around and inside him. It was reaching the point of fracture when the sound came: a terse, dry report, like the tolling of a cracked bell. It echoed once in the cave and grounded his unrest. Perfect calm swallowed all the ruptured time. He turned in the milky stillness to look at the split box that was now nothing but a nest of splinters.
He let the letter fall and walked over to the origin of the sound, stooping to retrieve the contents of the box. He lifted a heavy package of brown oiled paper from the wreckage, and something caught on the parcel and fell to his feet, like a dead bird. He set the package aside and picked up the two halves of coconut shell, joined together by a fractured, curved twig and a string of twisted vine. One of the shells had split; he lifted the other to his ear, the vine dangling around his wrist. A hollow wash of the ultimate, distant sea filled the cave; in its shell-like whiteness, voices whispered.
He carefully laid the contraption aside and lifted the heavy parcel. Unfolding the paper, he felt the reassuring weight of the Mars Fairfax in his hand; without memory or reason, he felt the heavy presence of the pistol ground him to another time and place.
He slept the night in the cave, unnerved but warm. He hoped some part of them might seep out of the stone, to embrace their current incarnation. He slept with Este in one hand and the letter in the other, the gun and the shell either side of his head. He slept knowing that everything in his life was a mystery, and that his only purpose seemed to be to travel through the Vorrh. There was a reservoir of memory that twitched towards the letter, but its cup was smaller than a synapse, and it held a single word: Oneofthewilliams.
His time in the wilderness was coming to an end. His work and his roaming had turned from gossip into legend. After all these years, his fame was spreading. Rocks and buildings became his subjects and stepping stones. He used lenses that moved long exposures and denied human presence, paradoxical stairs to the sight traps of movement. New and unusual commissions called to him, and he needed a single address to be reached by them all.
The technical processes had evolved in his absence, and they greatly excited his inventive mind. Once more, he moved back into the cities, cleaning his shutters for people. He clipped and curled his name again, giving it a unique quality; he opened his temple of lenses and a trickle of curiosity turned into a flood of interest.
His experiments in capturing animal movement caught the public imagination. His great success was founded on a gambler’s bet: Leland Stanford, the Prince of Wisconsin, wanted proof that horses flew, that they were suspended in mid-air as they galloped, jumping through space, all hooves losing contact with the ground. Muybridge’s job was to capture that momentous truth, and his wealthy patron was generous with both money and time.
Academic institutions wanted him. Europe called. Triumphantly, he returned to London. He was no longer Muggeridge, the coal-seller’s son – or Mirebridge, a name to span a bog, the split-headed, hollow man hiding in the colonies – but Muybridge, the scientist and artist. London praised him and he lectured to it. He had, of course, sent invitations to the surgeon, Gull, but never received a reply. He looked for him in the audience, and at the countless receptions, but was never rewarded with a sighting. He wanted to show the great man that he was healed, successful. The surgeon had seen deep into him; he had predicted the trouble when people became close; he may even have glimpsed the murder in that little whirling instrument of his, and the imbalance of their relationship made the photographer uncomfortable. He wanted to show Gull the man he had become.