Sacrifice of Fools (32 page)

Ongtith, guardian of paths and fords. This avatar occupies a central place in the Shian Dreaming, and existed in proto-forms thirty thousand years ago, when, at the end of the Shith Glaciation, she led the Old Hunters into the newly habitable north. In the historical period, this
hahndahvi
guided the nomadic nations across Sounyok, the continental forest, and is associated with both astronomy and the reading of forests signs. Frequently appears to new adults as they embark on their
wanderjahrs,
and thus has a secondary aspect as the guide of the young. Huge renditions of the Ongtith mask are painted on the ablation shields of Shian interstellar vehicles.

Her environment in the Dreamplace is always the forest clearing, her associated symbols are the fire, the staff, the petoun, the scent-laying stick, and the bare footprint. Her manifestations are as a female dressed in white. She is always barefoot and bareheaded and never speaks. If addressed directly, the
hahndahvi
will disappear. Though a guide, she is an ambiguous figure, she can lead both to and away from a situation, and her destinations may not always be those the dreamer might consider most beneficial.

Please rub the scratch-and-sniff panel at the bottom of the page for a sample of her identifying perfume.

Gillespie holds the book up to his face. It’s hard to make anything out over the glossy paper and printer’s ink, but then he catches it and for a moment the book unfolds around him and he’s standing in that clearing among the dark red trees and the light of a different sun is falling through the leaves and a creature in white is beckoning him down a path that curves away into darkness. Then he’s back in the big scruffy chair and it’s raining and the table lamps are lit and all he can smell is himself.

He shivers.

Another mask: a Shian face with wooden skewers sticking out of its nose and its head hair.
Plouterhai: the Questioner. Spirit of Penetrating Inquiry.
Penetrating inquiry all right, up its nose. This your one, Ounserrat Soulereya? The patron saint of lawyers? What would the
hahndahvi,
ex-con, ex-grease-monkey, Narha-speaking amateur knight-advocates be? I’m sure there’s something suitable, way down in the really obscure dream creatures, the bottom nine thousand that have about three followers each. What kind of mask would it wear? Dazed and confused, and under-shaved. Pouchy around the eyes, too much chin. Half an inch of stubble all over. Tired. That most of all. I know exactly its characteristic scent.

‘No luck then?’ Gillespie asks. Littlejohn grunts and waves a hand. Deep into it. Warmed within by beer and without by zero-point electric central heating, Andy Gillespie dozes in the big tatty chair. It’s been a long time and much happening since rashers and sausage and two eggs in the cheap hotel on the canal.

And Eamon Donnan, he thinks. What came to you out of the flapping things that live in the folds of the sacred space? What stepped out of your life into your dreams? Was it something you made up out of your memories and hopes and fantasies, or was it made-to-measure, an off-the-peg deity? How did you learn to dream? Whose tit did you suck it from? And when the
hahndahvi
came to you, did it know what it saw? Or did it say, get away from me weird half-thing, I don’t recognize you?

He settles into the chair and almost dreams of open-mouthed, staring-eyed, spiral-painted masks of Ongtith hurting through space. He’s woken by the consciousness that there is a face looming over him. Littlejohn.

‘I think we have something.’

The mask of the Littlejohn
hahndahvi
is worried.

The desk is covered in printouts. A starship icon in the top corner of the computer screen shows he’s uplinked to the Fifteenth Fleet Library at ten pounds a minute. Open windows all over the screen. He fetches fresh drinks from the kitchen. ‘This is going to take a bit of telling.

‘I had to go right back to the
Geduldehanna,
the epic poems of the founding of the Nations. They aren’t exactly religious texts because the Shian don’t have a religion, as such, but they’re the most ancient documents their race possesses; they’ve been preserved unchanged for ten thousand years, and before that they were passed down for God knows how many thousands more years as oral literature. They’re a sort of snapshot of the Shian in transition from a nomadic hunter-gatherer society to a technological culture. There are hundreds of the damn things, each Nation has at least one, and each is a thousand pages long; they make the
Mahabharata
look like a shopping list. And they’re bloody difficult to read,
hahndahvi
step in and out of them, you can never be sure whether we’re in the physical world or the Dreamplace, and the literary styles fluctuate between modes and Hot and Cool Narha, according to the season in which they’re set. Which is just to say it’s a bitch of a job, so you’ll properly appreciate the magnitude of my discovery.’

‘Which is?’

‘Let a man tell his tale, will you? I went to the
Corrosoun Geduldehan,
which is one of the oldest stories in the cycle. The Corrosoun Nation’s fallen a bit from glory over the millennia, but they were one of the most powerful of the early Nations in Central Great Continent, which is the birthplace of Shian civilization as we know and love it today. Basically, it’s this incredibly long and complex and quite unnecessarily detailed account of the establishment and defence of the Corrosoun hunting demesnes against the neighbouring Huskravidis, whom history has treated more favourably than their ancient rivals. I went to this cycle because it’s the only one that makes any mention of something we would call
war.’

‘I thought the Shian didn’t fight wars.’

‘They don’t. Not as we fight wars. Nations don’t mobilize against Nations, they don’t even have nations as we recognize them.’

‘I know this.’

‘Sorry. Lecture mode is a tough infection to beat.’

‘War is displaced rape, and their sexual make-up makes rape impossible for them.’

‘You sound like me.’

‘I should. I got it from an
Irish Times
article you wrote about a year back.’

‘I used to say something similar about serial killing too.’

Gillespie smiles wryly, apologetically.

‘I’m a scientist,’ Littlejohn continues. ‘If the facts don’t fit the theory, you’re supposed to throw out the theory.’

‘Supposed.’

‘We’re human. We like a familiar universe around us, that we know how it works, even the nasty stuff, like killing each other. And then these folk come and we don’t know how things work any more. They’ve rewritten the rules on everything else, why not murder?’ Littlejohn downs half his gin in one swallow. ‘When you were a teenager, you know, full of idealism and putting the world to rights and wouldn’t it all be very much better if only we did
this
instead of
that,
did you ever think wouldn’t it be great if, instead of fighting wars, like, say, the Gulf War, or even the Second World War, someone had just quietly blown away Saddam Hussein or Hitler before they started fucking things up, and then there wouldn’t even be a war? One death to prevent millions?’

‘Most of my teenage years were talking about girls or football or cars.’

‘Lucky you.’

‘I mean, sure, everyone’s thought of it, like if they’d killed off Gerry Adams, or Paisley. Or McIvor Kyle. Jesus God.’

‘For some people it’s more than just a good idea,’ Littlejohn says. ‘Now listen to this. Two passages from the
Corrosoun Geduldehan.
The first is in Cool Narha; I’m translating roughly: “Then the Hold of, ah, Good Killing by the Waterhole made war with the Hold of Fifteen Trees” — the text specifies a species of tree but it won’t translate. “They met at the open place and they fought until the close of the day with sundry weapons.” This is a shit translation.’

‘I think that should be “the green before the skinning hut” instead of “open place”, and “edged blades” for “sundry weapons”,’ Gillespie says, coming round the desk to peer over Littlejohn’s shoulder. Littlejohn bristles a moment.

‘I bow to your superior knowledge of the vernacular. It goes on…’

‘ “Many eyes were taken by the Good Killing Hold”,’ Gillespie translates. ‘ “The people of Fifteen Trees were shamed and did not leave their Hold for hunt or
kesh
or journeying for a year and a lesser moon. The earth was drunk with blood. Birds gathered in that place to gorge for many days, and the
hahndahvi
came to live there so that all who passed through that spot were visited for many nights by ominous dreams.” So they do have war.’

‘Where were you when I was doing my doctoral thesis?’ Littlejohn asks. ‘They have war in the same way as South American Indians or tribal people in Borneo do: small group to small group. Hunting parties clashing, conflict of demesnes, stuff like that. Small scale, like Scottish inter-clan warfare. Or our own home-grown ethnic head-hunting. More a vendetta than a war. You haven’t heard the second one. This is from a Hot Narha passage, written either during, or about, incidents that took place during, a
kesh
cycle.’

Windows close and open. It’s dark outside, the wind has risen and is driving the rain against the glass. Something is flapping in the yard.

‘From the
Corrosoun Geduldehan,
canto thirty-seven, part nine, stanzas twenty-five to twenty-seven. “Sestrahunna” — she’s a kind of Cuchulain figure, a Shian superheroine, cantos thirty to forty-five are dedicated to her exploits — “Sestrahunna’s people had been much troubled by the Hold of Great Safety, who were stirring up the other Holds to challenge the Corrosoun demesne. Therefore she went to the residence of the spirits” — what we’d now call a sacred space; the Shian dreaming has evolved a lot in sophistication since these things were written. “There she met a man dressed in crimson with a head-piece set with a thousand mirrors. He carried in his right hand a gutting knife. He greeted her and told her he was the Drinker of the Red Earth, the Divider of the Waters, the Cutter. He said that the people of Great Safety Hold were committing great folly. They were trying to hunt a river.” Note the “she” here.’

‘It’s the
kesh
form.’

‘Exactly. Couple of important points. The Shian didn’t go through a semi-aquatic phase in their evolution like humans did. They’re a very terrestrial species, they don’t like water, they don’t trust water. It can’t be contained, it’s liquid, mercurial, and it’s dangerous. You can drown in just a puddle of it. They have a great fear of drowning; it’s the most terrible death to them, because it’s always done alone, separate from the community. It’s a kind of annihilation. Water, the sea, lakes, rivers have sinister connotations in the
Geduldehanna.
It’s full of stories of lone Shian who were entranced by their reflection in water, fell in and were drowned. Trying to hunt a river is the ultimate folly, wasting the energy of the Hold on catching something that cannot be caught. The gutting knife is important as well. It has semi-ritual connotations. After the hunt the intestines and sex organs of the prey are removed — the sex organs are thought unlucky, except during
kesh,
when they are eaten as a delicacy. The text goes on: “Drinker of Red Earth, Divider of the Waters, the Cutter gave her the gutting knife, and told her to commit upon them the sacrifice of fools”.’

‘It what?’

‘There’s more. “She called upon herself shadows and wearing them like a cloak, she went to the Great Safety Hold and passed through its fences and hedges. She came unseen to the people of Great Safety, and their children with them, and with the gutting knife committed on their bodies the sacrifice of fools, unto the smallest child, sparing none so that their folly might not be perpetuated. Then she took the organs that she had cut from the adults and cooked them on the fire, and ate them, and the folly was ended and there was peace between the Corrosoun and their neighbours.” ’

Gillespie looks at the sinuous Shian script on the screen. He shivers. The cold has got into the warm room, inside him.

‘You’re telling me that Sounsurresh’s family, the Harridis, McIvor Kyle’s family, have been killed by a legend?’

‘There’s often truth behind our monster stories. Let’s take vampires. Solitary hunters of human beings. Damned souls. Deeply disturbed individuals, we’d call them these days. Ritual aspects to their killings, mutilation of the victims. Displaced sexual desire.’

‘Serial killers,’ Gillespie says. ‘And this sacrificer of fools, he’s stepped off the legends into our world. Into Belfast, Northern Ireland. No shortage of fools here. Christ, when I asked Ounserrat what “Sacrifice of Fools” meant, she told me it was a story, a legend, something made up to scare children.’

‘She didn’t lie to you.’

‘No wonder they want to keep it secret.’

‘Perfectly rational behaviour to them. Eliminate the threat before it even starts to threaten. Makes a lot of sense to me.’

‘But the family, the children.’

‘Eradicating the taint from the genepool. These people are deeply unsentimental when it comes to eugenics. What’s a few bodies in the foundations, when you look at our head count in two world wars? There’re enough nuclear warheads to kill every human on earth fifty times over, and a male sexuality that positively seeks conflict. Who’s scaring the shit out of whom?’

Gillespie sits down in the comfortable, tattered chair again. Empty beer cans and glasses are at his feet.

‘I’m finding this a bit hard to believe. OK, we’ve worked out what, but we haven’t a fucking clue who.’

Littlejohn’s silence is political.

‘You do have a fucking clue who.’

Littlejohn rolls his eyes.

‘Someone you got before all this broke. When you thought it was a human. Except it isn’t, but you still have a suspicion. Oh, come on. For fuck’s sake. You can’t be serious.’

‘He fits the profile.’

‘Eamon Donnan is no more a fool killer than I am.’

‘You fitted the profile, for a while.’

‘You were wrong about me, you were wrong that it couldn’t be a Shian, you’re wrong about Eamon. He’s a mate.’

‘This working-class ex-con male bonding is very touching, but Charlie Manson was once somebody’s mate. You say he’s a mate. All right. So what kind of a mate fucks off the moment he gets out to join the Shian? What kind of a mate is it thinks so little of humans that he wants to be an Outsider? Humans, including you, mate. Counts for a lot, doesn’t it? Did he ever give a moment’s consideration to what his good mate Andy Gillespie might feel about him turning himself into a Shian? What do you know about him? What did you ever know about him? Really know?’