A tree or a person or a.., p.21
A Tree or a Person or a Wall, page 21
But then how he was improved: how with his farseeing-eyes he might see a horizon placed half again as far.
How with his deaf-ears he might turn unflinching toward the screams of those the company’s sabers pierced.
How with his scribe-heart he might be able to remember the recent past; how with his sorrow-heart he might mourn what he remembered.
How with his dumb-heart he might make himself numb, so that he might live with what he had done, would do.
And tucked between them all, in the leather scroll within which he kept his treasures: the letter opener; the switchblade. To remind him even when his heart might not.
5]
Not every hovel was left unlawed. Krum, where Brother had found Gaab and where he had given Gaab his name, was still governed by the priests, and there were others too, villages both named and nameless where the company rode up to the gates and wheeled their horses neighing before the walls until the gatemen appeared to meet their holler. Remember how, at one such place, Brother entreated the gatemen to grant the company entry, for the company’s horses needed to be fed and to be reshod and one horse was sick or else lame and might need shooting if there was no good doctor taking residence in that town.
Remember how the gatemen agreed to open the village to the company but only after some delay. How nervous the gatemen appeared as they swung back the panels of high wood, revealing the rotted backs that would surely have given way had they instead barred Brother’s entry. But by then the streets were emptied of horses and mules and goats, all hidden now in cellars and bedrooms where perhaps the company would not bother to look, to look and then to covet. As in those days there was nothing that was not irreplaceable.
The company bedded their horses except for the ones that were to be shod and the one lamed up and the riders of those beasts went to begin their barter with the blacksmith, a man dead as all the others but otherwise unlike the men of the company: for the villagers lived their death with only one heart, one set of ears and eyes and one tongue, given to them by the priests, made from their own flesh and returned to work within it. Anything else was forbidden, and the villagers feared the priests’ birdmasks and their black cassocks above all else, for their power was that of life over death, over the deaths they were living. And if they were caught defying the terms of their making, then what happened next, and was it worse than this death everlasting.
6]
The company rested in the village square and the villagers kept their distance. Sometimes one scurried through the alleys around them, and the company men yelled out jeers at her disappearance. But mostly the riders kept to the shaded parts of the square, and there was so much less threat from the company then, less than when those men had been filled with blood and bile and jizzum: now there was only the violence and violence alone was generative of only so much fear. And even what pain did come might be made more temporary—for the village folk could be resewn and rewound and restrung—and it was said on the rim that it took a thousand cuts to put something so asunder that the priests would recognize its dissolution.
In that emptied square the company provoked no threats nor made any of their own and they made no unmet demands. The riders with the needy horses paid in fair trade for the work they wanted and out of old courtesies the villagers brought the rest some small meal of hard bread and water even though it was not necessary for them to eat or drink and in return those irregulars asked for nothing else except the dust and air they inhabited. But after Brother’s company had occupied the square for an afternoon and most of an evening a boy with a burned face stepped out of the village’s largest house and into the descending dusk and Gaab saw that the boy was not afraid of the company of riders and their gruesome gear: the dried blood on their uniforms; the knotted locks of hair stuffed under short-brimmed hats or else escaped from those confines; the stitchscars across their cheeks and brows and necks where amateur surgeons or else each other had put their flesh back to its right shape after the sharp passing of broadhead or lance or blade or bullet. And in some of those nameless low men there was even some of that flesh missing and even those gross displays did not stop the boy’s advance.
7]
Remember now the burned boy, the little chief of that little village, half his face a long open mess, crawled with sand; his chest shirtless and Y scarred; his chest-hatch stuck, its seams faded from lack of use, its crank still buried in the stopped flesh; buttonless pants belted with rope made of hemp or hair; baby teeth still rotting in his head, visible when he spoke, asking the riders where they were from and where they were going and why they were camped in his village.
Remember how in any way but shape he was not what was previously called boy, was instead only some stalled dwarf. How there had not been true boys among the rimfolk in that time but he looked like nothing else and so what else to call him. No adolescence had ever come upon his frame, but inside his skull rode an ancient mind, a brain first meant for no more than eighty or a hundred years, and who could tell how long it had been. And if there was eternity outside the bounds of the world, then it was never meant for the earthly kingdom and yet how eternity was all this longfailing world had left, for those there stranded.
The boy wore no shirt to hide the pistol scabbard draped around his body, slid upon a belt cut for the waist of a grown man, now falling down the boy-chief’s skinny bones from right shoulder to left hip, made with an old-world craft long forgotten, so that any replacement would be cruder made, if better fit. The revolver held at that hip was barreled as long as the boy’s forearm, and Gaab startled at the sight of its grip, wondered how a body so small could fire a cannon of such girth. But the burned boy wouldn’t have it if he couldn’t.
And in the boy’s other hand, outstretched toward the company: a small wetness, wrapped in cloth.
8]
At last Brother rising. His own body shorter than some other of the riders’ but bigger than all. Only his hands diminutive by comparison. As they wiped the dusk and dust from the epaulets of his uniform. As they rubbed themselves together before him and his speech.
Brother saying, We want feed for our horses, to take with us when we leave.
Only feed, the burned boy said. That’s all?
The feed is where we want to start.
The boy looked down at his own feet, shoeless since forever. Then back up at Brother: Are you trading or taking?
Trading, Brother said.
To start, the boy said.
To start, agreed Brother.
The boy’s hand sprawled on his cannon—the hand open, fingers splayed so only the boy’s palm fell alight on the wooden grip. We’ve seen such a company before, he said. Burned faces and blue uniforms, come to trade—and yet afterward only new begging and theft for my people.
Brother knelt down and picked his cap up out of the street and shook it clean and placed it back on his head. Hid that big baldness from the burned boy.
What happened to your last chief, Brother said. And remember how Brother’s questions were never questions.
And then the boy speaking again, saying: He was my father. But that sadness is long gone.
Remember the boy’s hand floating, unsure, then tapping hesitant his chest-hatch, that heart-cover. A space for him never opened. The boy always only himself, limited by the bounds laid down at his birth, both his birthings.
Liar, said Brother.
Brother unfastened the flap of his uniform, let the button-bearing left fall away, then the claspholed right. His chest flabby and shaking beneath a stained undershirt cut to the belly button to afford easy access. Then putting that access to use: spinning free the crank, swinging open the hatch. And inside, the beating of something monstrous. A mechanical pumping that moved no blood but thrummed with what blood had once signified. Back in the first of these days, before the last books, and in older times too, when books were scrolls and tablets and carvings in the caves. Those unreasoned ages, epochs ruled by nature and not by priests, their years long but maybe not longer than these.
Once Brother saw the burned boy had seen his offer, then Brother closed his hatch and shut his crank and buttoned back his shirt.
Liar, said Brother, again. Liar.
Remember that smile upon Brother’s face, remember his shifting his weight leg to leg, remember his words: If you want to remember your father, then best to see the world he saw. The memories of the missing.
9]
The boy’s eyes gleaming. Almost wet. But what moisture could they make.
And in his hand the small bundle, the biggest of its contents only the size of an apple, a fist held within a fist. And then some other miscellanea surrounding.
What remained: an inheritance.
10]
Gaab and two of the others held the boy down in the moony street and when he was mostly still then Brother set to digging with the point of his knife to expose the crank in the boy’s chest, hidden near one clavicle or the other. The plastinated flesh flaked at the knife’s touch but even as the boy screamed he did not bleed anything thinner than sap and when the hole was dug then Brother’s fingers pushed into the hole to turn the crank, to unlatch the chest-hatch—and still that movement would not come free until Brother further perforated its seams, an additional bit of knifework.
Remember the boy’s heart-hole open to the night air for the first time, and how it was too dark in that square for the boy to see down into himself from his angle and how for that he should have been thankful.
The machinery of the boy’s body and also the machine it had been made to be: a dry mechanism, without even the wash of blood to hide its working. And still the boy released an animal of noise when Brother broke the priestlaid fleshbonds that prevented his work, when he unplaced the boy’s self-heart and laid it upon the wrap, when he pushed the older other into its space, and then again as he plucked out the boy’s eyes and unsocketed his ears and his tongue and replaced them with what did not belong to him, this mismatched set of old-world biology.
11]
When Gaab stood he found his body shaken by the boy’s kicking and while that motion continued before him on the ground he watched as some number of the other villagers crowded near, circling the company in the fallen dark. A rough scatter of pale faces hidden behind veils and wide-brimmed hats, coverings meant to slow the sun’s decaying rays, and also those reflung by the moon’s reflecting, and among the villagers were men armed with some small weaponry and also women who shook with tearless weeping. Then the rending of their clothes, the wailing at what they had witnessed, until into their sound the boy stood up upon his old bones, himself still but in a new way: Remember a slight cock of the wrong hip. Eyes bulging and hue-shifted, ears misfit upon his head. Gaab saw perhaps the boy was no longer left-handed, that his hands fluttered in the wrong portion of the air, that he would have to switch his weapon over or else learn his other hand to hold it.
12]
The boy spoke.
I had forgotten, he said. Just a boy when the sky last burst. How bright that last sun was. And how that day my father was a man and I was a boy and so it was as a boy that I woke to the priests.
Their faces masked and beaked as eagles. Their hands holding angled steel like borrowed claws. The carvings they made, the clucking sounds of their tongues.
How little I understood afterward. How not even my parents would explain what I did not. How the words it would have taken were forbidden by the priests, who in those days still lived among us, instructing us how they wished us most to be.
What great meeknesses they asked of us. And then the world passed on, then the years passed.
I aged without getting older. How much worse it was to be this way. How much worse it was for my father and my mother to watch.
And yet how long they each did watch. And what quiet grief we made each night.
And then suddenly my father was dead, decades later, dead again by hands like yours, his body scattered so that he could not be restored.
And then my mother walking into the desert because she would not live here without him, not even after we found these few parts of who he was.
Since that day I have been chief instead. And now how many indistinguishable days has it been?
13]
Remember the other words of the boy, the way he could not stop his speaking of the world before this, until all the company was aflame with passion for what had been lost, but see also Brother in that moment as Gaab saw him: His master. His leader. His brother, so named. Remember how Brother’s lips moved in time with the boy’s. Perhaps he had tasted the heart’s memories already, before. Perhaps it was not one like Brother who had ended the boy’s father but one exactly Brother. Because there was nothing that Brother could not know or do. Because he had turned upon the rim since the beginning of this long end. Because Brother could not be killed again, because always he would remain unpunished. But even if Brother did know the words that the boy spoke, still they were not his own words. For of all the riders in the company it was only Brother who had no self-heart, and with no self-heart of his own no words he spoke were ever wholly his, not any combination of syllables Gaab had ever heard him speak.
14]
The crowd moved closer through the moonlight, an entire village closing around the company enclosed around their chief. Men and women and children moved together, and despite the spectrum of the shapes of their deaths all now roughly the same age: for what difference did the small fractions make, the few years of the last age they’d shared before this new one began. The priests had woken them as one body and now they moved in the same way against the new transgressor and against the company, and if Brother did not yet break the boy’s stare, then still his riders were not ignorant of the village’s progress, the loop drawing tight.
It wasn’t only violence that the riders could make but it was at violence that they were their most capable. A sword or a saber, a pistol or carbine loaded with powder and shot: these were the dictions of their best language. And some days only their loudest threat was speech enough. But the villagers knew that if the boy was allowed to stay, then the next priest who visited would see he was not who he had been, for the dead did not so quickly change. And then what hard hell to pay. The priests’ books said that under the sky upon the earth every man was already judged but that it was not the place of man to know his own judgment. Yet sometimes the evil man revealed himself to his brothers and his sisters and then it was their station to cast him from their midst. And anyway the boy-chief was no longer who he had been. For their chief had had eyes of brown and this other had eyes of green and even if they had not seen the surgery there in the darkness still they were not ignorant of what this change evidenced.
15]
The company put their backs to Brother and the burned boy and when the circle was complete it was Gaab who stood closest to his master, his own chest already full of shield-heart, his wary-eyes installed since the moment the riders had sat down in the dusty village square. And when the villagers fell upon them it was Gaab who fired the first shot and he watched his bullet clear some portion of the skull from a grayskin woman, the back of her skull-shape flapping away, made a new and bloody bird taking wing.
Remember how nothing flowed from Gaab’s shield-heart except satisfaction that his charge remained safe, that Brother went untouched. And then how his saber pushed into the belly of a man and then another man and then some false child armed with a club studded with nails lifted too high, exposing a span of unprotected fat that flopped open at Gaab’s suggestion. How Gaab stepped around those dropping weights to prick another as the villagers set upon the company with their amateur applications of sticks and stones and the repurposed instruments of their agriculture. In return that irregular company responded with musket and pistol and hatchet and mattock and machete—but despite those many bullets and blades there was no blood spilled between the dead, who could not bleed: only the parting of skin and plastinate. And until it was over there sounded only the clash of steel and the boom of powder and here and there some sudden surprise, voiced at the results of the dull blasts of the company’s firearms, the grunting work of ax and sword through already stopped flesh.
16]
Afterward, the villagers who could scattered to the holes of their homes and then the company stepped back too, widening their circle. Some among the company were sent to fetch the horses and to take what feed and tackle they had already bargained for and others were set to preparing their departure. One of the riders switched in his lust-heart and dragged the woman Gaab had made headless behind the deadened tree of the square and there he rode her bones until some of their number came unseamed, and though in his disgust Gaab turned away, still he heard the act’s grunting echo reverberate across the square, until at last he pocketed his ears.
17]
Remember what else Gaab saw, when he joined Brother standing watch over the sitting chief. How the boy sat slumped in dirt, his chin nodded onto his chest. How Gaab looked first at Brother, whose face declared no emotion, or else only the beginnings of a smile.
Remember your own such thought-relics, like a joke recalled.
Gaab saw the boy’s revolver in Brother’s hand but that didn’t mean Brother had fired it. He knelt before the boy, lifted the boy’s cheeks with his hands.
How the boy’s right eye was shot through. How despite its large caliber the bullet had made no backdoor exit, instead lodged somewhere in the putty of the brain.
How that boy’s smallest glimpse of the old world was either over or else inside his skull it would be everlasting and either way there was then no way to retrieve it, to make him speak again its visions, for no matter what tongue they next put in his head he would speak no story. And perhaps he would never be fixed. For even the priests did not waste their efforts rebuilding what was only partway broken. But the boy could stand and he could walk even if he could not shut the slackness of his empty mouth and so Brother strapped the boy’s cannon to his own belt and then he tied a lead around the boy’s neck and he fastened its end to his saddle and for some time after they left that village the boy would run after Brother wherever Brother went, his shut memories of the past trailing behind the company as the wedge of their horses carved slowly forward, into the long stall of future still ahead.
