Thus the Sign established itself, coming like a coded message from nowhere. Now its apologists range from wheelwright to Court ascetic; it is scrawled on every alley wall to fluoresce in the thin bluish moonlight; it rustles like a dry wind-or so it’s said-even in the corridors of Methven’s hall. Its complicated subsects, with their headless and apparently aimless structures, issue many bulletins. We counterfeit the “real,” they claim, by our very forward passage through time, and thus occlude the actual and essential. One old man feeding a dog might by the power of his spirit maintain the existence of an entire street-the dog, the shamble of houses with their big-armed women and staring children, the cobbles wet with an afternoon’s rain, the sunset seen through the top of a ruined tower-and what mysteries lie behind this imperfect shadow play? What truths? They process the streets impulsively, trying to defeat the real, and hoping to come upon a Reborn Man.
Such a procession now made its way toward the Bistro Californium, given up like a breath of malice by the night. It was quick and many-legged in the gloom. It was silent and unnerving. The faces which composed it were nacreous, curiously inexpressive as they yearned on long rubbery necks after their victim. Surprised among the Cispontine ruins not an hour before, this poor creature fled in fits and starts before them, falling in and out of doorways and sobbing in the white moonlight. A single set of running footsteps echoed in the dark. All else was a parched whisper, as if some enormous insect hovered thoughtfully above the chase on strong, chitinous wings.
Since their condition allows them no deeper relief, the merely selfish are raddled with superstition; salt, mirror, “touch wood” are ritual bribes, employed to ensure the approval of an already indulgent continuum. The true solipsist, however, has no need of such toys. His presiding superstition is himself. Galen Hornwrack, then, cared as much for the Sign of the Locust as he did for anything not directly connected with himself or his great loss: that is to say, not in the least. So the first clue to their coming confrontation went unrecognised by him-how could it be otherwise?
Glued to its own feeble destiny in the leaden blue moonlight, the clique at the Bistro Californium regarded its navel with surprised disgust. Verdigris the poet was trying to raise money against the security of a ballad he said he was writing. He bobbed and hopped fruitlessly from shadow to harsh shadow, attempting first to cheat the fat Anax Hermax, epileptic second son of an old Mingulay fish family, then a sleepy prostitute from Minnet-Saba, who only smiled maternally at him, and finally Mooncarrot, who knew him of old. Mooncarrot laughed palely, his eyes focused elsewhere, and flapped his gloves. “Oh dear, oh no, old friend,” he whispered murderously. “Oh dear, oh no!” The words fell from his soft mouth one by one like pieces of pork. Verdigris was frantic. He plucked at Mooncarrot’s sleeve. “But listen!” he said. He had nowhere to sleep; he had-it has to be admitted-debts too large to run away from; worse, he actually did feel verses crawling about somewhere in the back of his skull like maggots in a corpse, and he needed refuge from them in some woman or bottle. He nodded his head rapidly, shook that dyed fantastic crest of hair. “But listen!” he begged; and, standing on one leg in a pool of weird moonlight, he put his hands behind his back, stretched his neck and recited,
My dear when the grass rolls in tubular billows
And the face of the ewe lamb bone white in the meadows
Sickens and slithers down into the mallows
Murder will soothe us and settle our fate;
Hallowed and pillowed in the palm of tomorrow
We tremble and trouble the hearts of the hollow:
The teeth of the tigers that stalk in the shallows
Encrimson the foam at the fisherman’s feet!
No one paid him any attention. Hornwrack sat slumped at the edge of the room where he could keep an eye on both door and window (he expected nobody-it was a precaution-it was a habit), his long white hand curled round the handle of a black jug, a smile neglected on his thin lips. Though he loathed and mistrusted Verdigris he was faintly amused by this characteristic display. The poet now choked on his horrid extemporary, mid-line. He was becoming exhausted, staring about like a bullock in an abattoir, moving here and there in little indecisive runs beneath the strange Californium frescoes. Only Hornwrack and Chorica nam Vell Ban were left to importune; he hesitated then turned to the woman, with her pinched face and remote eyes. She will give him nothing, thought Hornwrack. Then we shall see how badly off he really is.
“I dined with the hertis-Padnas,” she explained confidentially, not looking at Verdigris as he bobbed uxoriously about in front of her. “They were too kind.” She seemed to see him for the first time, and her imbecile smile opened like a flower.
“Muck and filth!” screamed Verdigris. “I didn’t ask for a social calendar!”
Shivering, he forced himself to face Hornwrack.
A grey shadow materialised behind him at the door and wavered there like some old worn lethal dream.
Hornwrack flung his chair back against the wall and fumbled for his plain steel knife. (Moonlight trickled down its blade and dripped from his wrist.) Verdigris, who had not seen the shadow in the doorway, gaped at him in grotesque surprise. “No, Hornwrack,” he said. His tongue, like a little purple lizard, came out and scuttled round his lips. “Please. I only wanted-”
“Get out of my way,” Hornwrack told him. “Go on.”
Scarlet crest shaking with relief, he gave a great desperate shout of laughter and sprang away in time to give Hornwrack one good look at the figure which now tottered through the door.
A thin skin only, taut as a drumhead, separates us from the future: events leak through it reluctantly, with a faint buzzing sound, if they make any noise at all-like the wind in an empty house before rain. Much later, when an irreversible process of change had hold of them both, he was to learn her name-Fay Glass, of the House of Sleth, famous a thousand and more years ago for its unimaginably oblique acts of cruelty and compassion. But for now she was a mere faint echo of the yet-to-occur, a Reborn Woman with eyes of a fearful honesty, haphazardly cropped hair an astonishing lemon colour, and a carriage awkward to the point of ugliness and absurdity (as if she had forgotten, or somehow never learned, how a human being stands). Her knees and elbows made odd and painful angles beneath the thick velvet cloak she wore; her thin fingers clutched some object wrapped in waterproof cloth and tied up with a bit of coloured leather. Muddy and travel-stained, there she stood, in an attitude of confusion and fear, blinking at Hornwrack’s knife proffered like a sliver of midnight and true murder in the eccentric Californium shadows; at Verdigris’s disgusting red crest; at Mooncarrot and his kid gloves, smiling and whispering delightedly, “Hello, my dear. Hello, my little damp parsnip-”