Watson, Ian - Black Current 01 (18 page)

 
          
And
here was I, opposite Tambimatu in the spinach jungle. Verrino was four hundred
and forty leagues away—a distance rather more than half the length of the
river.

 
          
Nevertheless,
1 set out.

           
 
 
         
I
had no idea how far I'd travelled. Or how many days it had taken.
Seventy?
A hundred?
I'd lost count.
There was no way to measure the leagues. On this sort of a hell-walk a league
seemed an impossibly ambitious unit of measurement. I might have accounted for
thirty, or
five score
.
I was hungry, filthy, and fairly crazy.

 
          
Inventory
for a hell-walk: stout river boots (good for a long journey), a pair of
breeches, and a blouse, now tattered. Plus pocket knife and comb and a piece of
string.
Plus, of course, my wits.

 
          
I
didn't eat well but at least I did consume enough to fuel me to tramp and
thrash my way onward. I ate land-crabs and snakes and grubs, all raw. I ate
tubers and fungi and fruit. I suffered stomach aches, and spent one whole day
curled up in misery. However, I did remember Lalo's lore of the jungle. This
jungle wasn't the same as the Jangali type, at least not at first. Even so, I
managed to avoid fatal poisoning. I reminded myself that other creatures
happily thrive on a diet of grubs and beetles and live frogs—down on gut level
I was an animal too.

 
          
The
first haul through the spinach puree was the worst; but I still had reserves of
fat on me then.

 
          
I
mentioned my wits as an asset.

 
          
In
one respect my wits were quite disordered. For wit means knowledge, but what
did I know? I knew the east bank from Tambimatu to Umdala. Of the west bank I
knew nothing.

 
          
Yet
the word "nothing" hardly sums up the quality of my ignorance. I
hadn't exactly known Jangali or Port Barbra, before I sailed to them. Yet I
knew where they were! I knew what
The
Book of the River
said about them.

 
          
Here
on the west bank
The Book of the River
meant nothing at all. It was as if the world had changed into another one
entirely. And my map of it was blank.

 
          
This
sheer blankness was the first shock I had to cope with. For the first time in
all my life no reference points existed. My only signpost was the river itself;
when I could see it, which wasn't all that often. Once or twice when I was able
to "camp" near the water at dusk, I spotted a tiny masthead lantern
far away: that was all I ever spied by way of distant nightlights. My only real
clue to my whereabouts came from the changing nature of the jungle itself: the
decline of puree, the rise of occasional rubyvein and gildenwood, then at last
halls of jacktrees and hogannies.

 
          
Yet
the jungle seemed endless and chaotic. When I thought I had passed beyond one
type of vegetation, it would reappear. I would be forced to seek the river to
reassure myself that I wasn't simply stumbling back the way I had already come.

 
          
While
in another respect: I had no
human
reference points. I was utterly alone with myself: more so than any prisoner
shut up in a room with no windows, because that at least would imply the
existence of people outside. I, on the other hand, could go anywhere I wished;
and it seemed there would still be no one to speak to or to hear my voice, ever
again.

 
          
When
you're shoving your way through jungle all day long you don't spend a whole lot
of time meditating or soul-searching in any very lucid or logical way. Yet your
brain does chum over obsessively for hours on end. And what I was thinking to
myself (if you can thus dignify the process whereby the milk of thought gets
churned into stiff sticky butter which clogs your head up!), was that in all
the time since I'd joined the
Spry Goose
in Pecawar I hadn't really been communicating with people.

 
          
Oh,
I'd been talking: to Jambi, Klare, Lalo, you name it. I hadn't related, though.
I'd been detached. I'd been viewing myself as a character in a tableau.

 
          
Here's
Yaleen at Spanglestream, admiring the phosphorescent water! Here she is at
Croakers' Bayou: behold the swamps and stilt- trees! And here she is shinning
up a tree in
Jangali. . . .

 
          
Even
when I rescued Marcialla from that trapeze, I'd been a sort of actor or emblem
of a person, like someone pictured on a fortune card.

 
          
So
it seemed to my churning brain.

 
          
I
tried to count the number of conversations I could remember in any detail from
the previous few months, compared with gabbier days of yore. This might be a
more rewarding pursuit than trying to reckon leagues.

 
          
It
wasn't. There weren't all that many.

 
          
If
I can put it this way, borrowing from those critics writing in the Ajelobo
newspapers, what I'd been living all that time had been narrative rather than
dialogue. I'd made myself into something of a third person, so that what
happened to
her
didn't fully affect
me.
I hadn't realized this, any more
than I'd noticed until Ajelobo that I'd been doing without sex for months.

 
          
People!
How I yearned for them, now that there were none!

 
          
"Oh
Hasso, where are you?
You who were gentle and witty!"
I cried out, silencing the idiot jungle noise; then I stifled my cries in panic
lest some savage Son of Adam heard me.

 
          
Many
were the times I raved and rambled on to myself, and started imaginary
dialogues—abortive ones which rarely got far beyond the opening gambits;
whilst I ploughed through the puree, and subsequent jungle.
Surviving.
Surviving!

 
          
I
guess in such a situation you either go mad, or else you grow up. You become
yourself at last, your true self. Because there's no one else available—and
"
yourself
" had better be big enough to bail
you out of this scrape!

 
          
I
grew up—I thought. At other times I wasn't so sure; and regarding this whole
period I can't really guarantee the validity of my feelings or supposed
discoveries about myself.

 
          
Sometimes
when I stopped to camp—in the crook of a tree or under a bush—and when I'd been
lucky enough to grab a bellyful of crab, worm meat and tubers, I loosened my
breeches belt. I masturbated. And I thought hectically: not of insouciant
Hasso or of my happy dalliance with sweet Tam in Aladalia in the days of what
seemed my youth.
But of the wearing of black robes.
Of the private lives of humiliated women.
Of
a great grim Son of Adam who owned me, and was noble, but a brute.
Black
hateful fantasies, these!

 
          
Was
this adult behaviour? Perhaps in a perverse way it strengthened my spirit.
With my playful, clever fingers I embraced a hateful future. Coming to terms:
you could call it that. I think I was sick with loneliness, and this was the
only way I could discharge the accumulating poison. I think that to survive
such an ordeal—one which just goes on and on remorselessly—you need something
to hone you, to enflame you, to make you into a weapon, a mad thing. I could
hardly revenge myself on the trees. I could hardly promise myself vengeance
against any known individual. So instead I imagined humiliators and enslavers;
and thus I advanced to meet them, day by day. I embraced what I most feared, to
screw up the courage to continue.

 
          
By
now I had somewhat discarded the bright idea that I was going to stand opposite
Verrino Spire waving my tom blouse till some miraculous rescue party wafted
across to me. . . .

 
          
My
first menstmation of the journey I coped with, using wads of moss. My second
flow was thinner; hunger and exhaustion were drying me up.

 
          
An
heroic slog through wild jungles for weeks on end . . .
Do you expect battles against giant reptiles with crystalline eyes (me armed
with my pocket knife)—instead of a tale of what I did in my pants?

 
          
Well,
there
were
incidents. Not many, but
some.

 
          
There
was the day when I stepped on what seemed to be a bed of moss. It was thick
green scum, instead. I plunged through into a shaft of water. My flailing left
arm was seized by teeth like needles. I never saw what was trying to eat me.
Terrified, choking on the scummy water, I battered my free fist against the
source of pain.
Which let go.
I wallowed and thrashed
my way back on to dry land.

 
          
Blood
welled from inflamed stab marks. But I spotted one of those dripping moss-mats
which Lalo had assured me would staunch and disinfect. Leaping, I tore handfuls
loose, to bind round the wound with my piece of string.

 
          
The
remedy must have worked. My arm ached, but it didn't swell up or turn purple or
throb with pus and poison.

 
          
Then
there was the day I met a monster. It must have been the great-grandma of all
croakers. It squatted in my path like a huge leathery boulder, high as my
chest. Its eyes bulged at me unblinkingly. Its throat membrane pulsed.

 
          
"Arrkl Arrk!"
I heard from
directly behind. Naturally I turned to look. At the last moment I recalled the
ventriloquist trickery of croakers and hastily converted my turn into a leap
aside, and a roll and scramble through undergrowth.

 
          
Crash!
Where I'd been a few seconds earlier, now the great- grandma croaker sat
slumped, a-quiver. Its eyes rotated. It shuffled about.

 
          
"Urrk!
Urrk
!"—again from behind.
Scrambling up, I fled.

 
          
Nor
must I forget the day of the piranha-mice.

 
          
A
sudden hush came over the jungle, stilling the usual modest anarchic racket. In
place of this, a moment later, I heard a rustling as of wind-blown autumn
leaves down north in Aladalia or Firelight.
A surging.

 
          
Ahead,
undergrowth rippled. A grey living mass was advancing at speed, replacing the
green. A million tiny creatures were gobbling everything in their path.
Leaping, scuttling, climbing, dropping back —and chewing, always chewing.
Leaves, flowers and moss became raggy in a trice, and vanished. Some thrashings
and brief squeals marked where more mobile items of dinner took exception to
being eaten. Something the size of a cat scrabbled for a tree. I couldn't
identify it—it wore a second coat of squirming grey. The unlucky victim clawed
bark, then fell back into the mass beneath. It seemed to deflate in an instant
as if it had only been filled with air.

 
          
This
happened very rapidly. In another few seconds I would have become hapless prey
myself. The wavefront of hunger was nearly at my feet. I too scrambled up a
tree, with a few grey scouts already hanging on to my boots. I crushed the
ravenous little bodies against the trunk. I clawed and climbed higher.
Obviously the things would eat anything. Even in my half-starved state I was a
great prize of meat and guts.

 
          
I
was terrified. How high would they climb? The grey mass heaped up around the
base of my refuge. Parts of it made tentative leaps and forays. Tiny teeth
darted. Hanging on precariously, I stamped and punched as best I could,
bruising
one fist then the other. A thin eager whistling
rose from below.

 
          
But
then—as though clouds had obscured some inner sun which fit up all their
vicious little lives—the scouts stopped climbing. The mass subsided. The whole
grey carpet ceased its flexing and writhing. It settled. It lay still.

 
          
Quickly comatose.
Asleep.

 
          
The
food-run was over. I was of no further interest. Nothing was, but slumberous
digestion.