The freedom artist, p.18
The Freedom Artist, page 18
At first the populace did not notice this cascade of the image on them. Like fat rough snow, the image fell on them and they did not notice. They were practically sleepless. Then at a crossing, waiting for the light to change, a young woman looked at the image on a paper and gave out a cry of recognition.
The cry communicated something to those around her. Slowly they picked up the fallen bills and looked at the image and a collective gasp of recognition flowed through the streets. Gasps turned to murmurs. Murmurs turned to speech. Speech turned to shouts. Then an unnamed commotion began in the heart of the sleepwalking world.
14
It was a commotion without a purpose. Here and there people were shouting. There was talk of rioting. No one knew how to riot. No one had done it in recorded time. People stood around, arrested by an emotion they did not know how to express. This unfocused rage left the sleepwalking city dazed, and uneasily aware of its own condition.
What was it that had so stirred them? What was it in the image of the prisoner that had broken through their sleepwalking?
The cries from the crossroads, from the streets, the howls at bus stops, the sudden breakdowns of drivers, commuters, workers, managers, and road-sweeps hinted that perhaps the cry was not for something perceived in the world, but for something perceived in themselves.
People woke up on that dawn and saw their faces in a mirror in the streets. They sensed, in a flash, that they were the ones in prison. This was the conjecture put forward by those who wrote the chronicles of the times. This is not proven. Storytellers sometimes see things before they have been experienced.
15
The commotion in the cities gathered force. Barricades were set up. Groups swelled in number. An unknown voice was heard to cry:
‘Not crushed like a flower.’
In the manner of Chinese whispers the phrase was passed on by wandering groups.
‘Find the tower! Find the tower!’
Crowds converged, crowds swelled, the roads filled up, work was abandoned for the day. People simply stopped working and went outside and joined the huge flowing stream of voices chanting and calling out and shouting. If ever there was a crowd in search of a reason, this was it. With one voice, they sought the tower of the Hierarchy. They marched to one square and then to another. The truth is that they didn’t know what they were searching for. They didn’t know the focus of all their undefined anger, their numinous fears. They had caught a glimpse of themselves in prison and they sought their jailers in vain.
The truth was that no one knew where the tower of the Hierarchy was. No one had ever seen the Hierarchy and no one knew what it looked like. They sought shadows in vain. The bizarre fact was that they roamed and searched and shouted in the streets, but not a single figure of authority confronted them that day.
By the day’s end the steam of their vague fury was spent. Exhausted and disappointed, they dispersed back to their homes under the gloom of night.
Book 6
1
Karnak had heard all the rumours that swirled round the city. He had heard about all the sightings of the boy-warrior, but had never seen the boy-warrior himself. Every time he heard of a sighting he had rushed there, but the crowds were scattered and he arrived too late. All he got was the afterglow of the magical event as people talked about it in the heat of invention.
He did not know whether to believe what he had heard or not. He hadn’t been the same since his meeting with the mother of Amalantis. He was more accepting of what he saw, no longer alarmed at seeing neighbours with a chunk of thigh missing or a face chewed off. When he saw a woman he knew with only the stump of an arm he was no longer taken aback. Something about the visit to Amalantis’s house had made him accept the facts of the world. It had made him begin to see reality.
He feared that his heart had died, that some feeling for the suffering of the world had died in him too. How could he see the casual horrors without extreme distress?
One day he was looking out of his window when he saw a bejewelled car pull up at the kerb. Two men got out. He thought that they had jackal-faces but wasn’t sure. While he stared he saw the two men fall upon a homeless young man from the area. They fell on him and devoured him in broad daylight. They ate him with such fury and at such speed that there wasn’t even a bone or a skull to show that a human being lay there by the roadside. Their jackal-faces returned to normal faces and the two men slid back into their sparkling car and sped off.
Karnak watched this from his window as if in a dream and was so stunned by what he saw that he had to lie down. He couldn’t bring himself to believe what he had seen. He fell into a traumatised sleep. Then he had a dream in which women with jackal-faces were about to devour him, and he woke up howling.
After that, a flame died in him. He kept expecting people to leap on him at any moment and devour him. He kept to himself and went out less often. Shadows and dark places quivered with jackal-faces. When he did go out he didn’t speak to anyone and he noticed that the fields were empty. Children no longer played in the parks.
He noticed that the mood of the people had changed. He got the feeling that people were looking at one another out of the corner of their eyes. Even when they were not facing you they were looking at you.
He sensed that everyone feared what he feared. Everyone expected to be pounced on and eaten alive by secret jackal-faces in their midst, faces that seemed so normal. Just being spoken to made people jump in fright. When they walked down the street people seemed to walk as far away from the next person as possible.
Women ran from place to place without stopping. Old women scurried quickly away. Young men looked in every direction as they walked.
There was an acute nervousness everywhere.
2
On the day the images of the imprisoned man cascaded down, Karnak was on his way back from the Work Generation Centre. A wet bill slapped him in the face. He tore it off and looked at it. Touched by an obscure light that seemed to shine from the image itself, he experienced a moment of revelation.
He stood there staring at the image. Suddenly he felt something become clearer within him. White birds in formation flew past in the sky. They wheeled and circled and without counting he knew there were eighteen of them. For a moment they froze in the sky. Above them was the moon, which he hadn’t noticed till then. In that moment the birds were like droplets of the sweating moon.
He felt the drops on his face and it occurred to him that the moon was weeping. He became aware of the road he was standing on, and saw that it ran between buildings with battlements and crenellations. The road seemed a dull yellow.
The birds scattered in the air and the moment passed. With the passing of the moment he felt as if he had been freed from a mental frame. He felt unknotted. He went home, lighter.
3
That evening while Karnak stood at the window looking at the moon, he noticed a movement among the shadows on the road below. Then he saw a girl lurking there. He stared at her for a while, wondering what she was doing there in these dangerous times.
Then as he felt himself less vacant it occurred to him that the girl was staring up at his window. Not long afterwards a car went past and its crude headlights picked her out as she tried to hide in the bushes. It took him a while to grasp what he had seen. It was the girl from the bookshop, Ruslana. He hadn’t seen her for a long time, but he recognised her instantly.
He hurried downstairs and sought the girl in the street. He couldn’t find her. The street was deserted. A bird nearby piped out a broken melody. He wandered far in the darkness of the street, and became a little afraid. Feeling that he must have imagined what he saw, he turned back. Near the pillar of a darkened house where the night seemed most intense, he could have sworn he saw the darkness move. He turned in the opposite direction.
He hadn’t gone far when he heard a sound behind him. He swung round and saw a jackal-face staring at him. With a cry he started to run, but he heard a girl’s voice.
‘It’s me.’
It was Ruslana, with a flower in one hand and the mask of a jackal-face in the other.
‘You scared me. I could have died of fright.’
‘Sorry.’
‘You shouldn’t scare people like that in these horrible times.’
‘I really am sorry,’ she said. ‘But the mask protects me. Without it I could not be here.’
Karnak was still breathing heavily from fright.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, when he had recovered.
‘I’ve come to collect you. Something is happening at last.’
‘What?’
‘I’m not sure. Seems to be many isolated things. But something big is happening. It can be felt in the underworld.’
‘What is it?’
‘I’ll tell you on the way.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘I think they’ve found the prison.’
‘What prison?’
‘The prison where the boy-warrior is kept.’
4
They made their way like fugitives through a night of jackals. It was pitch black in spite of the sweating moon. They wandered through desolated tenements, giant council estates with gut-rot on the walls, through wastelands where the arm or leg of some victim of the night rotted among the accumulated junk of the streets.
They made their cautious way through a night of howls and cries that pierced the silence. The howls came from darkened houses, from grim sleepers.
The bookshop girl wore her jackal mask. Sometimes Karnak was not sure whether she had changed or not. Once turning a corner, the mask brushed his shoulder and he shouted involuntarily.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ she said.
‘I think I saw them devour a man tonight. I still haven’t recovered from the shock of it. Do you have to wear that thing?’
‘I feel safer with it. Among jackals you must seem a jackal. How safe do you feel with your normal face?’
At that moment they heard grunting noises coming towards them. The sounds were punctuated with rough laughter, and then a howl of raw pleasure. Then more grunting. They hid behind a garden wall and watched as three men, jackal-faced, dragged behind them the corpse of a woman. They waited a long time before they emerged from their hiding place. When the grunting and rough laughter receded, they broke into a run. Ruslana put her mask back on. It was clear that nowhere was safe.
They heard broken howls coming from the distant houses. Sometimes it sounded as if a whole household was being butchered. They kept close to the hedges, crouching as they ran to avoid being seen. Thick clouds darkened the sky and across the land a ghostly sigh could be heard, as though the wind were drawing its last breath in the evil hour.
They made their way through the streets, taking short cuts through the gaps between buildings. They came to a woodland that led up a hill. Ruslana seemed more at ease. She took off the mask and stopped walking.
‘Bodies are being washed up on the shores of the river. Parts of bodies are being found in cellars, or on rubbish dumps. People are returning from the grave.’
She paused, then said:
‘But when the bodies were inspected they were found to have come from the other side of the world. They are not our bodies.’
She paused again.
‘Have you heard the rumours?’
‘Which ones? I’ve heard so many.’
‘The latest ones.’
‘No.’
She took a deep breath and began to climb the hill. It was the hill where the boy-warrior was first sighted in the attire of a fool. The wind rushed up the steep hill and they found it hard climbing in the dark. Clouds massed in the sky. Howls and cries from all over the city seemed to converge on these heights.
‘They are going to torture and kill him, unless something happens,’ she said suddenly, in the dark. ‘If they kill him, they kill something in all of us.’
5
The hill they climbed was more like a mountain. They were climbing for a long time and still they were on the lower slopes. The earth was soft as if it had rained. But it hadn’t rained. The plants were hardier and sparser as they ascended. Trees gave way to shrubs, shrubs gave way to gorse. The earth was drier. The screen of furze all around made it hard to see.
They went in silence along a trail that unfolded in the dark. There were times when the trail was invisible and when they weren’t sure they were on the right path. But Karnak followed Ruslana unquestioningly. She moved with sureness in the dark, as if her feet could see. She walked without doubt and she rose steadily.
Sometimes the path became visible. When it was visible it gave off a yellow light but Karnak was sure he was imagining this. They clambered up in silence, but there were wafts of fading screams, falling howls, rising cries, from the distant sleepers.
As they rose Karnak saw a yellow-green star pulsing in the depths of the sky. He watched it as he ascended. The earth became stonier. They may have been scaling the rough paths of a mountain. They climbed silently for a while. Then Ruslana stopped. She was no longer holding her mask.
She had stopped because she was looking up at something Karnak had not seen. When he looked up his heart heaved in wonder that he had been chosen to see this sight. He felt himself unworthy. He knew at once that he was seeing something rare, a vision in real life.
He felt like those seekers of old who beheld, in the golden breath of a moment, the mysterious image of initiation. He felt like those secret alchemists who, after a lifetime of experimentation and dedication, finally witness the transformation of an ingot of lead into the immortal lustre of gold.
High on the highest crag of the mountain he saw the figure of an ancient hermit, clad in the grey mantle of night. On his head was a blue cap shaped like the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The lantern he held aloft shone as a six-pointed star. The light from the lantern streamed downwards, intermittently illuminating the path.
6
They resumed their climb. Sometimes they saw the light from the lamp and sometimes they didn’t. They rose steadily till they reached an eminence. They could see clearly all around. The gorse had fallen away to reveal many thousands of people, all with little lamps, making their way up the sides of the mountain. They formed a moving constellation of lights on the dark earth.
‘Who are all these people?’ Karnak asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Ruslana said. ‘But they’re a sign.’
‘Of what?’
‘That something is happening.’
They went on with their path. As they climbed, so did the others. They moved with the massed forces of their lights, pursuing their steady ascent till they were as high as they could get, given the nature of the paths. The people with their lights formed a strange congregation, all around the high peak, in the dark. The stars in the sky had nestled down on the mountainside. The people waited and were still.
High above them, on what must have been an ancient crag from the lost ages of the mountain, the hermit stood, holding his lamp aloft. But for the curious illumination of his lantern he could have been a figure carved from the rock of night. It seemed as if he were perched on a rock and at the same time standing on a cloud. He was silent. All they could hear was the wind in the sky and the howling in the city. Then not even the howls were heard as they listened to the hermit’s silence.
There are many conflicting views of what happened next. But the result was the same. Some said that in the silence the hermit made a speech which was carried around by a swirling wind. Some said the hermit said nothing, but in the nothing they saw and heard things. Some saw the image of an emperor sitting on a cubic stone. A ram’s head projected out of the side of the stone. Some saw the image of a prison. It was part of the night. It was square and mighty and dark. Some saw the image of a tower struck by lightning. Some said they heard a new sermon on the mount.
The real effect of whatever they had seen or heard was that the hermit disappeared. It happened at an unknown moment in the night when there was a shift in the constellation. Thrown back on themselves when the dazzling light from the hermit’s lamp was no longer there, the multitude at last acted. They poured back down the mountainside. They moved in mantled silence, holding their individual lights aloft, an army of lights descending the mountain. As they went down, a voice, the voice of the bookshop girl, cried:
‘To the tower! Let’s destroy the tower!’
7
No one had ever seen the Hierarchy. No one knew what the Hierarchy looked like. The people had been governed by them for generations, but they had never seen those who governed them.
They had never seen the tower either. Its existence had been a persistent rumour from the underworld which had acquired the reality of fact. But no one had ever seen it. There had never been any references to it in public communications or official circulars or edicts. The Hierarchy had no headquarters known to the people. As far as the people knew, the Hierarchy did not need headquarters. In the popular mind the Hierarchy was not a people. It did not have members. It did not meet in any place. The Hierarchy simply was. It existed. It was numinous. Its powers extended beyond time and space.
To the people, the Hierarchy had control over the weather, over night and day, over the flow of rivers, over the growth of crops. The Hierarchy was the power that governed, dictated, enforced. It was the invisible will. It was the central power without a name, without faces. It had power over destiny.
The Hierarchy was omnipotent. It dwelt with every man and woman and child. It was everyone’s dreams. It was good and evil. It was past and present and future. The Hierarchy was everywhere.
It was beyond thought that the Hierarchy would meet in a place, or that it had anything resembling a physical organisation. No one had ever thought such a thought. The populace lived with its notion of the Hierarchy under the darkness of a mountain, under the wings of a giant bird bigger than the sky.
