The Gabbet-Fairfax ‘Mars’ pistol was one of the first of its kind. A self-loading semi-automatic with an astonishing ballistic power, it looked like an axe or a hammer, and possessed a rudimentary ‘L’ of a body, an ugly, unique elegance of top-heavy dense steel, smooth and uncluttered. The rear end of the pistol was infested with a knurled mechanical contrivance of the breech, hammer and sights. The Mars was intended for military mass-production, but it entered the world backwards, and at the wrong time. It came with the same consideration that sent the mounted cavalry into the gas and machine guns of the First World War, with the pedigree of a medieval killing field: it could stop a horse. It sounded like the end of the world. Its recoil could break the shooter’s wrist and spit hot, spent cartridge cases back into their face. The imagined accuracy was never achieved because its marksman, having taken the first shot, shivered and flinched so greatly before squeezing the trigger that it was impossible to aim. It was the most powerful pistol ever conceived or constructed at the turn of that century, and nobody ever wanted to use it. Less than a hundred were manufactured. So how one found its way, sheltering with the Enfields, into the heartland of the True People was unknown. What was known was that it vanished at the same time as Peter Williams.
Twine, splinters of wood and weightless teeth-shards lie with the wingless bodies of twenty swallows at my feet, their strange, streamlined eyes looking in all directions. The shape of their eyes is echoed in their wings, the same wings that now grace my arrows. A sea fret rises at my back, and the horizon is gated, hinged on shadow. I am ready to leave these bleak, soft lands.
Tsungali unwound his sitting body and dropped soundlessly to stand, waiting a few seconds before he was called inside. Slow-motion dust clouded around his long, shoeless feet. He walked behind the soldier, who escorted him to the barracks door. As he entered, the soldier grabbed at the Enfield, gripping it midway. Tsungali barked a word or a sound that was a cross-breeding of multiple ferocities, one taken from cats and snakes, birds and winds. The hand sprang back to hang limp and tingling, as if electrocuted, at the terrified soldier’s shivering side. Tsungali’s eyes drummed the officer’s attention. He swallowed his contempt and waved him away. The shivering soldier left the room.
Tsungali walked in and smelt himself there years before, the rush of memories filling the hollows of his previous nervous system. For so it is among those who shed lives every few years: they keep their deflated interior causeways, hold them running parallel with their current useable ones; ghost arteries, sleeping shrunken next to those that pump life. Hushed lymphatics, like quiet ivy alongside the speeding juice of now. Nerve trees like bone coral, hugging the whisper of bellowing communications.
That old part of him swelled with an essence of himself before, nudging the now in a physical déjà vu, becoming two in the stiff interior of his body, ignoring the even stiffer officer who glared in his direction. The overhead fan waded in the congealed air, stirring heartbeats of a larger beast and giving rhythm to the mosquitoes queuing to taste the sweating white skin of the officer, who choked out, ‘You have been asked to come here’ – the claws of the word ‘asked’ scratched the inside of his throat – ‘for a very special purpose.’
Night and insects.
‘We are looking for someone to hunt a man, someone we can trust.’
‘Trust’ nipped at his balls and diaphragm.
‘Someone with all the skills, a bushman warrior.’
Even the officer heard the condescension and it halted him, giving him time to look more appraisingly at the man before him. He was tall but slightly bent. His formidable skeleton had been broken and repaired many times. The flesh and muscle was hard, dark meat, pliant and over-used, solid. The skin was losing its once blue-black sheen, a faint grey opalescence dusting its vitality. The uniform was worn-out and rearranged, mended into another version of itself, turned into how he had wanted it to be: the opposite of its function of uniformity and rank. Its blueness was waning, building a visual alliance with the man’s skin. He looked like a shadow in the room and perhaps he was: a static shadow being cast by what was now happening in his swirling being, a gap of light spun out of a space in time.
In this departure, the officer was given a moment to look at Tsungali’s face, which was now still – not in calmness, but more like a single frame taken from a fast-moving film, held in blur at an unnatural rest. It had been some years since the officer had been this close to him. He had been in chains then, manacled to the courtroom floor. The ferocity of that man’s face had been in the wild passion of its movement and malice. Now it was formalised. The lines of twisted hate had been wrought into signs and contrivances, the spitting screams written in careful glyphs. His motionless face writhed in a balanced book of deep scars, an illuminated tapestry of skin, not unlike his grandfather’s. Neither was it unlike the body of the Enfield, which had itself become a carved narrative.
The officer stared at the polished bolt of the rifle; polished not by pomp or fetish, but by use.
‘Where is he from?’ said Tsungali. His voice stopped the mosquitoes and caused the room to listen.
For a moment, the officer was jarred back into the abhorrence of their business, and didn’t understand the question. Then he said, ‘He’s a white man.’
Ishmael did not know that he was not a normal human, because he had never seen one. The gentle, dark brown machines that nurtured him from infant to child, child to adolescent, looked like him in shape but were made from a different material. He had grown in their quiet, attentive care, knowing he was not the same, but never dreaming that he was a monster. There were no monsters in his world, deep under the stables in the old city of Essenwald.
It was a European city, imported piece by piece to the Dark Continent and reassembled in a vast clearing made in the perimeter of the forest. It was built over a century and a half, the core of its imitation now so old that it had become genuine, while the extremes of weather had set about another form of fakery, forcing the actions of seasons through the high velocity of tropical tantrum. Many of the old stone houses had been shipped in, each brick numbered for resurrection. Some of the newer mansions and warehouses had taken local materials and copied the ornate, crumbling splendour of their predecessors, adding original artistic brilliance in their skeuomorphic vision of decay. It was prosperous, busy and full of movement, with solid roads and train lines scrolling out from its frantic, lustrous heart. Only one track crawled into the dark interior of the forest. Into the eternal mass of the Vorrh.
The city fed on trees, devouring the myriad of different species that ferociously grew there. Sawmills and lumber yards buzzed and sang in the daylight hours, rubber works cooked sap into objects, and paper mills boiled and bleached the bodies naked, ready for words. All this appetite was allowed by the forest. It encouraged the nibbling at one of its edges and used it as another form of protection – a minor one in comparison to the arsenal of defence that kept the Vorrh eternal.
Essenwald’s declaration of power and continuance was written throughout the labyrinthine manuscript of its twisting streets.
One crooked causeway was called Kühler Brunnen, its handwritten name nailed high on its sunless side. A house of significant age stood at its middle; its core was among the first to arrive and be sunken into the heated ground, on the site of a more sacred enclosure that some said was older than humanity itself. Parts of its later exterior had been copied in anthracite-rich stone, mined from a long-extinct quarry. Its proportion and whereabouts were stolen from one of the bitter-clad cities of northern Saxony. Its windows were shuttered. It quietly brooded, while deflecting any attention. Its small, neat stables contained three horses, a polished carriage and a working cart. Cobbles and straw gave movement and scent to its courtyard’s stillness, while far below, beneath the blue and yellow, the brown ones hummed and fussed over the white thing they grew. The air was filled with their scent of ozone and phenol and the slight singeing of their overly warm bodies, an odour of life which led to cracking and brittleness, emitting its own distinctive hum, in the same way we age with wrinkles and softening.