The Scorpion God: Three Short Novels (4 page)

“I’ve cut it fine tonight, haven’t I?”

In the corner was a low altar built against the wall. Great House cleaned himself with holy water as he gazed round him apprehensively at the darkening sky. He dropped a pinch of incense on the glowing charcoal, then muttered a few words so that a thick column of white smoke pushed up into the darkness. He went hurriedly to the other three corners and made more columns. He stood for a while checking on the columns; then turned away to go back to the banqueting hall. As he went he muttered again, either to himself or the young man.

“At least I can still keep the sky up.”

In the hall, the guests were ranged behind the tables, looking down, and saying nothing. The Liar knelt by the couch, his hands fastened to one of the legs as if it would save him from drowning. Great House heaved himself on to the couch and lay on his side.

He spoke.

“I should like a drink.”

But before anyone could move, the Head Man had caught him by the wrist and was speaking to him through his quiet smile.

“Don’t you understand, Great House?”

Great House turned to him. His solid face quivered.

“Understand?”

“This morning you fell. This evening——”

Great House caught his breath. Then he began to laugh.

“You mean, it’s a beginning?”

“Just so.”

The silence behind the tables broke up. There was a sudden gust of whispers.

“A beginning! A beginning!”

The Liar let go the leg of the couch, grabbed at the curved head, knelt there, eyes shut, head up. He shouted.

“No! No!”

But Great House still laughed. He swung his legs off the couch and sat there, laughing and speaking directly to the assembly.

“Strong beer and no hangover!”

The Head Man smiled and nodded.

“Beautiful, changeless women——”

The Liar began to babble at the God.

“Of course, Great House! What else does any man need? Beer and women, women and beer, a weapon or two—what else does anyone need?”

“His potter,” said the Head Man. “His musicians. His baker, his brewer, his jeweller——”

Great House tweaked the Liar’s ear.

“And his Liar.”

The Liar’s babble ran up so that all other sound in the hall died away. The Head Man patted him.

“Calm yourself, my dear Liar!”

The God looked down at him, his smile broadening. He was in high good humour.

“What’s all this? I simply couldn’t do without you!”

The Liar screamed once. He leapt to his feet, glaring round him. Then he was off, sprinting down the hall. He dived over the musicians and took one of the curtains with him. There was a scuffle and a series of thumps, soldier-sounds, blows. There were orders. The Liar yelled again.

“I won’t!”

The scuffles and thumps receded down the corridor; and once more, but fainter this time, the assembly heard the Liar, shouting in terror and indignation.

“You fools! Can’t you use models?”

Nobody moved. Every face in the hall was flushed with shame. The darkness where the curtain had been torn down was like an obscene wound in the fabric of life itself.

At last the Head Man broke the silence.

“No more tiredness.”

Great House nodded.

“And I shall make our river rise. I swear it.”

Now, along the tables, people began to laugh and weep.

“Forgive your Liar, Great House,” murmured the Head Man. “He is sick. But you shall have him.”

The guests were beginning to move towards Great House from the tables. They wept and laughed and stretched out their hands. Great House dashed a tear from his eye.

“Dear family! My children!”

The Head Man cried out.

“Bring Great House the key!”

The guests moved into two groups that left a passage down the hall. Presently, from the darkness beyond the place where the curtain had been, a little, old woman came veiled and slow and carrying a dish. She gave it to the God, then turned aside into the shadows. Great House received the drink and laughed with excitement. He held the dish up with both hands. He cried out in a loud voice.

“To keep Now still!”

He drank and drank, tilting back his head; and softly, with tiny shuffling steps and a muted clapping of hands the guests began to dance. As they danced, they began to sing, nodding and looking at each other with shining eyes.

Great House lay back on the couch and closed his eyes. The Head Man leaned over him moving his limbs, setting his knees together, smoothing down the rumpled kilt. The musicians began to play, catching the time from the dancers. The dance quickened and the God smiled in his sleep. The Head Man took his arms and folded them across each other so that they lacked nothing but the crook and flail. He tried the pulse in the left wrist, listened, ear against chest, for breathing. He stood up, moved to the end of the couch and slid the pillow from beneath the sleeper’s head.

“
The
river
has
risen
and
will
not
fall
”
they sang.
“Now
is
forever!
”

They were moving in a complex weave that sorted itself little by little into concentric circles. The lamps flickered in the wafts of hot air. Servants and soldiers filled the spaces of the doors. Kilts and transparent dresses stuck to flying limbs.

The Head Man stood behind the couch and faced the dancers. He lifted his hands. The dance stilled, the music fell silent, instrument by instrument. He beckoned and soldiers and clean men pushed through the crowd. They formed round the couch, then lifted it easily. They bore it through the hall and away into the deeper and darker mysteries of the Great House. Then the guests went silently, not looking back. The banqueting hall was empty of all but the Head Man. He stayed where he was, looking at the lamps and smiling faintly. Presently, he too went away to sleep.

Only one part of the Great House remained awake. This was an upper terrace that fronted the distant river; and here, a group of women crouched, saying nothing, but staring in silence at the girl who lay sprawled in her hair with nothing but one snatched-up shawl to cover her naked body. There was tension in her every limb. The forearm on which her smeared face lay, ended in a frenetically clenched fist that jerked every now and then at a sob. Sometimes the other hand would crawl over the floor then beat on it, and from her squarely opened mouth, a long wail would issue like a child crying. When the cry had ended, she would sniff and hiccup and moan words into the silent air.

“Oh the shame, the burning shame of it!”

When the river rose at the behest of the Sleeper, the only living things taken unawares by the expected were those most immediately connected with it. The cranes and flamingoes would stagger, flap and squawk when the minute rising built up into an occasional ripple. After the first one, they greeted the rest with bird noises of satisfaction. They became busy and zestful at the unexpected ease of life. They pecked and gulped as if they were hard put to it to keep pace with the fertility of the dried mud which once wetted, spawned all kinds of agreeably edible life. When only a few inches of water were thrusting across the stubble, the ducks came in flotillas, quacking complacently and allowing themselves to be carried by the push of the flood. The hawks and buzzards that were normally indifferent to the fields now hung in a line over the limit of the advancing water. The shrews and fieldmice, the snakes and slow-worms that had no built-in foreknowledge of the inundation and now made a panic way towards higher ground, learnt a bitter and useless lesson. But the people who knew why the river was rising and knew what full bellies it would bring were filled with joy and love for the Sleeper, so that when the air was cool enough they sang and danced. In the hot time, since there was nothing else to do, they sat in the shade and watched the waters advance. When dusk released them from the tyranny of the sun, they would walk, splashing through an inch or two of warm water over mud as hard and rough to the feet as a brick, and perhaps bend and lave themselves. Those who went deeper to the limit of their fields to catch a view they remembered, felt the first slipperiness of the slime and stood, rubbing their feet in it with a pleased smile.

When the water had reached the Notch Of Excellent Eating—when the hamlets had been so long isolated that some of the younger children thought it a Now that never moved—the day of waking slid into place. It dawned like every other day, green, then red, then gold, then blue. But the people heard the shawms braying and looked at each other laughing, since the shawms and the Notch Of Excellent Eating had come together.

“Today the Sleeper wakes into his Now and will send the waters back.”

For this reason they kept watch from the roofs of their houses and explained the thing to their children. All morning the shawms brayed and the drums beat; and then at midday when the sun glared down at the flood which steamed back at him they saw the procession set out along the strip of dry land left between the cliff and the flooded earth. They saw how the Sleeper himself lay at the head of the procession. He lay on a litter carried by eight tall men. He was swaddled from head to foot and richly plumped with his hands crossed over his chest and the crook and flail in them. He was of many colours but mostly gold and blue; and even at a distance they could see how his beard jutted against the shivering of the cliffs. The long-haired women came dancing after him, crying out, some trying to wake him, each with a systrum in her hand, others wailing and cutting themselves with knives. After them came clean men and other people of his household; and then a group of men and women who walked sideways, hand in hand. It was a slow journey the Sleeper took. It was a long and slow procession that straggled behind him, or paced friezelike on the causeways by the water. Many of the villagers, drawn by love and curiosity, climbed down from their roofs and waded towards the procession. They stood, big-eyed as children in the water and watched it pass. They called out to the Sleeper, but he did not wake since the clean men still had work to do on him. So they stood, since wading, they could not keep up with even such a slow mover and they greeted the groups one after the other.

There was one group they did not greet but watched in silent disbelief. At the tail end of the procession and separated from it by a gap, came a detail of soldiers with the Liar struggling among them. The collar of Great House was round his neck as were his collars round the necks of those who walked sideways and hand in hand. If the Liar—as he sometimes did—contrived to get a hand free, he would tear at the collar with it. Moreover, sometimes he shouted, and sometimes he screamed, and sometimes he moaned; but all the time he struggled with the soldiers so that they had a hard job not to spoil him. He was in a fair way to spoil himself for there was a scum of foam round his mouth. His noise penetrated most of the way up the procession.

“I won’t, I tell you! I don’t want to live! I won’t!”

The last man of the handholders looked back then turned again to the woman in front of him.

“I could never understand what Great House sees in him.”

The waders climbed on to the causeway and hurried after the procession and the Liar. When the land broadened and the procession stopped, breaking into separate groups, the waders became a crowd.

The procession was grouped before that long, low building round which Great House and the Liar had run. There was a passage, now, that led down before them, between sloping sides of rubble and the farther end was in deep shadow, away from the sun. The opening into the building occupied only half the width of this passage; and to one side of the opening, there was a slot, at eyelevel. Those in the procession who were near the beginning of the passage, could see the slot; and even those too far off, or hindered from seeing by the crowd, knew the slot was there, and what would gaze out of it.

The bearers took the Sleeper down the passage, lifted him off his couch and stood him on his feet but facing out into the air. The people, crowding forward, could see that he was still asleep, for his eyes were closed. But the clean men came with their instruments and powerful words; so that presently his eyes opened, and a clean man threw away the clay that had kept them closed. So the Sleeper woke, and Great House stood and stared through his family out of his motionless Now, in life and health and strength. Then the Head Man—since he was a clean man among other things—performed his office. He wrapped the life of a leopard round him, girding it at the waist. He lifted a small adze, with a flint blade, and he forced the blade into the wooden mouth. He levered with it, and those who were near enough heard a crackle like fire among small branches. When the Head Man stepped back again, the people could see that Great House was speaking a word in the motionless Now, for his mouth was open. So the dancing and singing began. But among the dancing and singing, many people wept a little to think how elusive their own Now was, and no more to be caught than a shadow. The soldiers, the bearers, and the clean men took Great House out of the passage and on to the roof of the building where the rare and heavy logs had been laid aside so that there was a gap. They took Great House down with them; and the soldiers who stood on the roof round the hole, saw the God laid in a stone box, saw the lid slid into place and sealed. Then the clean men climbed back and left the God among his chambers of food and drink and weapons and games.