The Divinity Student (11 page)

Miss Woodwind is watching the octopus. She’s by herself, leaning on the glass rim, lights filtering through the water to catch in her hair and flicker in her eyes and off her teeth, tracing like fingers the contours of her face and body, tinting her nails and soaking her clothes. The Divinity Student smells her before he sees her, soft on soft air, her fragrance sweeter for not being boxed in the office. Not moving, she’s staring at the octopus, meeting its gaze directly.

She doesn’t look when he comes up. “Would you look at it?” pointing, “look at the way it hovers there.”

Now she favors him with a bright face—“How beautiful it is!”—and goes back to watching it.

The Divinity Student nods absently, looking at her. She’s dressed like a schoolteacher, but excited like a little girl. All alone and she comes here; he’s never seen her outside the office like this, nor has he ever seen her with friends, although he had assumed. He looks closely, and he finds on her face the kind of enthusiasm that is cultivated alone and rarely displayed to anyone but strangers, and he feels honored to be given access to her privacy. She watches the water, and he watches her.

Then she notices him again. “Oh, you!”

He turns his face to the pool and the water lights, puts his hand on the cold glass, but he’s trying to think of something to do. Already, she’s muttering to herself and drifting off; he has an impulse to plunge his head into the water. Instead, he immerses his hand and brings it out, freezing with cold water, letting it spill in long clear festoons from his fingers. Unsatisfied, he does it again and again, staring at ropes of water encrusted with lights.

“Looking for something?”

“You’re a word-finder,” he says, gasping because the cold makes his fingers hurt, “you’re the best of all of us . . . ”

“You’re flattering me?” She looks like she’s getting ready to grin.

He shakes his hands sending droplets pattering on the glass. “You were looking at the water, so I thought perhaps some of your talent could have rubbed off.” That sounds desperate.

“Rubbed off into the water? How superstitious of you.”

“I only want to be as good as you are.”

That was bald enough to evoke a grin of surprise. Her face opens a little in curiosity. She mutters a response; he doesn’t hear. He sees her interest reawaken. Papers rustle in his chest.

And so they walk together. Her eyes fixed at some vanishing point on the horizon, walking with her hands behind her back, and his following the changes movement makes in her, as the lights pass and fall behind, and she changes all colors, reminds him of the kaleidoscope. She’s speaking to herself under her breath all the time. Then out loud she says:

“You know, I shouldn’t worry if I were you—the last few batches you’ve brought in were remarkable.”

He nods.

“It must be difficult, or perhaps you’ve found some special place where the words dangle from the trees, waiting to be picked . . . ?”

There’s something suggestive in her tone.

“Playing dumb?” she still isn’t looking at him. “ . . . I know where you get those words.”

He hadn’t submitted anything from the Catalog, he’d forgotten each word as the fragments left his hands—but he might have remembered them in his sleep.

“You walk in your sleep, so you hear words that people say without knowing they’re saying them. I’ve seen you in the plaza mooning about like a ghost. You stop every few moments and scribble things in your notebooks that no one else would have heard. I know your tricks.”

She hasn’t turned to him once, but she walks beside him as if she knows exactly where he is. Headlights sweep over one corner of the gardens; they flash in his spectacles and then he’s speeding invisible down a side path chased by a wild car horn blaring from the street, birds burst shrieking from the trees overhead. But the light passes; unsatisfied, the car pulls away. The Divinity Student looks around for Miss Woodwind, and she’s right there beside him, smiling pleasantly up at him, with her arms crossed.

“You’re right to avoid them—they’re driven by demons.”

“They’ve been after you?”

One eyebrow raises. “No, but I’ve seen them do their business. You watch out!” She taps his chest with a finger.

For a moment they sit still in the shade, listening to the crickets, her lips moving quietly to herself. Her face is mostly hidden, lights from the street shining between the leaves illuminate one high smooth cheek, garlanded with wisps of glowing hair.

“Come on, I’ll show you something!” and she hurries off over the grass, under the trees.

They follow the course of a stream along a rocky path overgrown with vines, Miss Woodwind knifing through the bracken unhindered, the Divinity Student shredding and tearing behind her. No matter how he tries to catch up to her she always keeps ahead of him; his feet feel like blocks of clay dangling awkwardly at the end of his feet. He redoubles his efforts and presently walks directly behind her. By planting his feet precisely in her footprints he avoids the pitfalls.

One by one the lights dim and vanish, along with all sound of voices, wood and the smell of wet earth close around them, the city melting far behind. He follows her smell and the whispering of her voice with a sensation much like shifting from one dream to another. Trees get denser on all sides; he senses that no one has ever been back here before, pressing in toward an oasis older than the city.

A wind comes up and a roaring sound, she points. “There!”

She turns her brilliant face to him framed in a halo of hair. “It’s the source of the stream!”

Just beyond her pointing finger a great spiraling channel of water gouts up out of the ground, cutting straight for the rocks and the gorge upon whose rampart they are standing. Trees stand all about the waters’ edge following with their branches the flow of current, the air curiously stirred here by the speaking of the water at the center.

“I’ll show you the way,” Miss Woodwind’s voice is perfectly audible over the noise. She weaves along the bank of a small tributary up to the main pool, an eddy where the flow is quiet, where the water is filtered through old tree roots and between rocks. One boulder shows a flat face and that’s where they sit down, both turned to confront the stream bursting shouting out of the ground. Miss Woodwind looks at the Divinity Student for a moment, and then favors him, bending to cup her hand under the surface of the pool, bringing it up full, a bowl barely dripping.

“If you really want to soak your head, you should dunk it in here.” She offers him the water, and when he hesitates she grabs the back of his neck and shoves his face into her cupped hand. He drinks soberly, and all the while she watches him with her lips moving, speaking softly and warmly to herself. She draws more water and he drinks from her hand again, motionless, bowing over her palm, and Miss Woodwind turns her face up to see gray sky and metallic stars through a black web of tree boughs, and sees the talking water flashing by like smoke and lightning from its source. The Divinity Student laps droplets from her palm, and draws his face along her fingers, and she finds her hand still resting on his neck, and it goes soft and strokes his throat a little. He looks up and she turns him toward her, drawing her water across his face with her hands, and bringing him in close, the things she tells him, she tells him, and tells him.

Slabs of crushing heat fall and shatter on San Veneficio’s shoulders, boiling back from the empty ground outside its walls to surge up the streets, churning into doorways and bulging against gray window glass like sheets of mercury. The great herds of giant monitor lizards are shut deep in the desert’s recesses, where the blast of the sky’s open oven is only a thin whistle of stirring dust and broiling plants. All along the city streets green leaves wither yellow-brown, in cracks, and, overhead, copper domes and gilded spires slant blazes down onto the streets, refocusing the sun. Magellan swings back and forth before his fractured window, while his familiars rub their velvety hands dubiously, watching him. When his couch swings forward to the summit of its arc, Magellan’s wax-white face is only a foot from the glass, and as he falls backward he brings another part of the city back with him; San Veneficio trickles down vines of incense into his ears and the corners of his painted eyes, he can see the lowing, shrieking animal souls of magicians pacing invisibly on walls and rooftops, or weaving unseen between pedestrians’ feet.

The Divinity Student can see them too, now, for the first time. He’s walking down the center of Monument Street, so named for its many statues, some set on high pedestals, others standing on the curb, leaning against buildings, trees, and storefronts, or sitting on benches. Out from the shade, the Divinity Student stands full in the heat’s hammering in his heavy coat, defying the sun, the passing cars, buoyed up, the cool water in him and running down his face. A cattish ghost-familiar wauls from a monument’s bronze shoulder, seeing him see it, and he shrieks back in its own language, pulling a face so horrible that pedestrians scatter out of his path, their white cottons flapping. The spirit’s eyes flash and it bolts down a drainpipe, and somewhere an old misanthrope, brimming with bitter malice, poised over some catastrophe, gasps and stumbles, shivering off to hide in a corner. The Divinity Student laughs a silent witch laugh after it, and multicolored throngs of animal souls up and down the street fan out to avoid him, peeping at him in fear, irritation, derision. They, none of them, they don’t challenge him.

At the end of the street he drops out of sight. Today he’s getting ready for Chan. This morning, as he had passed beneath an oak tree, a card addressed to him had dropped into his hand from the boughs, inscribed with the location of Chan’s grave, so he’s heading for the chemist’s—he’s a regular by now—puts the two barrels of formaldehyde—“very fresh, this imported you know”—on account and takes a cab back to the butcher shop. Teo’s retrieving a carcass from the meat locker, the Divinity Student walks in hauling the drums and shoves them into a corner.

“Assignment from the Seminary,” he explains.

“You live an adventure,” Desden says, retreating into the shop with the meat.

The Divinity Student zigzags across town buying specimen jars and surgical instruments, special saws, a shovel, bags, and a rickshaw handcart with money he’d received from Fasvergil, comes back a piece at a time and dumps the stuff by the barrels, in the locker, with the exception of the handcart, which he chains outside by the broken horse trough. Eventually, the day’s baking is done, the sun going down runs crimson over the town, air thinning, and he draws up to rest a moment. Teo comes out of the shop.

“What are you going to do?”

“I need a favor.”

“For your assignment?”

“Yes.”

“Anything.”

“The use of your shop, or a private room . . . I don’t know for how long.”

Teo comes closer. “What for? Secrets?”

“Yes,” the Divinity Student leans forward off the wall, “what I did with your horse I’m going to be doing to people. I’m stealing the body of a word-finder tonight . . . I’m supposed to dig through his memories and find certain things he took with him.”

“These things being special words? . . . I would assume that, since he was a word-finder.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“This is going to involve more than one corpse, isn’t it?”

The Divinity Student pauses. “Yes, possibly as many as twelve . . . ”

Teo suddenly gets excited. “Listen, the bodies, what are you going to do with them when you’re through?”

Shrugs. “I’d dump them somewhere. Perhaps rebury them if I’ve got the time.”

Teo comes closer still, eyes bright in the alley lights. “But you don’t need them for anything else?”

“I have to keep their brains, that’s all, everything else is waste as far as I’m concerned. None of them is going to be very fresh.”

Now the butcher pauses, his stained apron humming blue-white in the thinning sunlight. “You can use my shop, or my apartment upstairs, whatever—provided you let me help you.”

The Divinity Student remains silent.

“I have the shop and the rooms, I can be very useful to you. Just let me help, you won’t regret it, you’ll see—I’ll dispose of the bodies myself.”

The Divinity Student looks at him.

“Let me have the bodies when you’re through with them!”

“ . . . Why do you want them?”

“I’ll dispose of them for you! You can’t simply dump them, they’d be found and traced back to you. Reburying them would be just as obvious. If you let me help, I can get rid of them. They’ll vanish as if they had never existed.”

The Divinity Student grinds his knuckles against his head thinking.

“Please!” Teo hisses.

“All right . . . Provided you help with everything.”

“Yes!”

“May I use your apartment?”

“Yes!”

“And anything else I ask, you’ll do?”

Desden gives a small bow with shining eyes. “Your servant.”

“All right, ‘servant,’ help me load up the cart.”

Desden ignites like an engine, tossing shovels and equipment into the cart. He closes the shop early and runs after the Divinity Student, pushing the cart in front of him.

Together, they walk streets that weave crazy patterns, passing dice games and weavers’ looms on front stoops clacking out across the curb. And here’s the church quarter; the street is lined with small chapels on all sides, some of them tucked into alleys, makeshift enclosures for tiny shrines, and booths selling incense, candles, prayers, offerings, flowers, nurture fires, and hymnals. With eventide approaching the crowds come out before dinner, in some places songs already rising out of doors and windows, but the people make way for the Divinity Student unasked. Hurry along quickly, out of the way and down to the cemetery.

A large, L-shaped building squats on that block, with a heavy black gate and yawning arch in place of a front door. Beyond, the graves lie marked, spread haphazard under dead grass. The gate’s locked—the Divinity Student takes a metal rod out of his pocket, coats it with pink rose water from a little vial and starts rapping it against the lock. Suddenly, the rose water congeals and the rod freezes to the lock as solid as if it were welded there; the Divinity Student pulls the gate open using the rod as a handle, motioning Desden inside.