The Narrator Read Online Free

his nose, even his ears are unshrivelled. The air in the cave is redolent of the odor of his tears, a salty air like sea breath, but without the underlying, living mustiness. Two deacons, with feathers in their hair, sit on the floor by his side. They live in the cave, keep watch over the saint, and further his medicine with their singing. Each takes his turn echoing the other, and the song is long deep sinus notes that hum in the stone, consonants as light as rustling leaves.
    Visitors come daily, bearing offerings of flowers and votive body parts. Organs lie embedded in enormous bouquets of flowers, and the walls, which in places have been terraced, glow with vivid ruby hearts, piles of severed arms and hands, muscles like bundles of carmine wire, platinum braids of nerves, topaz pancreases, lungs pale rose as dusk’s first shadings, plaited rivers of hair, majestic livers of royal purple, slabs of snowy fat, fragrant pink brains smelling of soluble minerals, elaborately knotted ivory intestines ... by the entrance, air sluices through grates of stretched human vocal cords, the sound joining the deacons’ song. All these treasures are fresh and glowing with dismembered life. They glitter in the vaults of my imagination as Beardo describes them, and seeing them so vividly in there I feel as though a voyage to the cave itself would be redundant now.
    Shade of trees with long-bladed leaves, a dusty corner courtyard with cool sunlight on the stone walls. Flat, leathery pods, like bumpy little belts, litter the pavement. He waves me into his small office, all leather this and rosewood that. I am shown ranks and ranks of uniform volumes with gold edgings; these are the encyclopedic writings of Alak specialists about the natives here—their history, language, religion. Of course, no Alak has ever actually visited Tref; or if any have, they didn’t draw attention to themselves, and that would have been out of character. The books were written in the capital, on the other side of the world, and brought here—unless they are copies made somewhere in between, in which case nothing of the capital adheres to them. Like most of the citizens of the Empire, I have never laid eyes on an Alak.
     
    *
     
    Air fresh and cool round my shoulders, still early in the year.
    Everything seems to spin away from me as though I were near the center of a vast level wheel, which collects and disperses and collects again out of the substance and people of the city. I can feel the dizziness whirling up to me, and I have to stop and hold my head in my hands. How can I leave this place in uniform, march and get shot at? It’s a bad dream. The worst dream.
    I duck into the post office and line up in the clammy gloom under a low arched ceiling. Like being inside a clam, I imagine, deep under the sea I’ve never seen. The counter is marble topped with greasy steel and the clerk behind it is no less impassive, explaining to me that the money I was told my parents would wire to me here has not come, pointing numbly again and again to the spot in his thumby ledger where my name would be if there were any legitimate reason for me to expect such a money order which there isn’t. I feel something cold and disgusting splash behind my face, trying to ooze out of my eyes, but satisfied with warping my voice so that I can hardly make myself understood. This, on the assumption that there were any human beings present to understand me. I am sickly trying to explain myself to a glazed crust filled with grey clam mush. The other patrons are understandably curious about this adventure of mine, and I can feel their runty eyes peer after me as I leave in a hurry.
    It all seems less gay and diverting in the stark blare of sunlight outside. I have only the few lonely amber coins of Shoanly clacking in my pocket, already too little to send a message of explanation back home. What do you do with a good explanation no one can hear? I feel conspicuous and cursed. I take those