Beneath Ceaseless Skies #110 Read online

  Jon replied in kind. “You called it a god, just a minute ago.”

  “You are new to our language,” the man said. “You misunderstood.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  The point was not one of semantics only, nor even academic pride. If this was merely a place of worship of some purported god of the lower case, some inert image honored by the kópees, arrangements for its removal might easily be made with the local authorities. They were inclined to view the kópees as the worst sort of atheists: the honest atheist, by denying God of the upper case and gods of the lower case, creates a vacuum that, in time, the inevitable course of human nature, hungry for civilization, a source of morality, and salvation, will fill with belief in the True God; but the kópees, by stuffing that vacuum with their great multiplicities, create the illusion of fullness and stifle the natural evolution of True Faith. (Thus, anyway, runs the argument of monotheists.) But if this was indeed the locus of a djinee, a real creature, Jon knew it could be a difficult thing to return the stone to the Pink Chapel.

  Jon braced his morals and launched his lie. “Whatever you call it, it’s no matter to me.” And he resumed his inspection of the block.

  “Do not misunderstand this, monsieor,” the man said. “You must leave this place.” His words were a command; his tone, a plea.

  “Why? Isn’t this the khedeev’s alley?”

  “The whole city is the khedeev’s, if he wants it. But the duty of this place is mine, by the will, I pray, of God.” And he bowed slightly and made a mourning-like gesture with his arm, almost touching the top of his head with the fingertips of his cupped hand. This was a sign of those faithful to the Sole of the Sun, Wáálreyá, long dead but anticipated by some to return.

  This made Jon very curious, that a man of the solar faith—and apparently of some financial means; a good foreign-made shoe and a trouser leg briefly emerged beneath the tattered hem of his robe—would associate with a place of superstition like this.

  The Ópetian said, “You would do me great ill if you were to stay where you are. And you would do yourself no favor, either. You have no cause to trust me—none at all—but you will have none to blame but yourself for the evil that follows if you don’t heed me. They who come here are not to be crossed without consequence.”

  There was a sound at the mouth of the alley, a portamento whistle, the signal Jon had missed before. Iánheh vacated her place as a small mass of humanity dressed in dark robes began to thread its way down the alley.

  The man said, “Come, come, come!” so excitedly that he broke back into his native Harábese. Anyone would have understood him because he thrust Jon Fox into the little house. “By God’s mercy, it’s the blind ones,” he whispered in Provench. “Maybe God does favor you! God favors the mad, doesn’t he?”

  Jon sat down in the doorway to watch the man go about whatever odd business his God had appointed to him.

  The “blind ones” who came spoke a back-alley dialect of Qárene Harábese. Old women’s voices, these, but also the fussing of a baby. The Ópetian took the stack of bowls outside and arranged them near the relief of the eye.

  Two women sheathed voluminously in black passed by the door. They sat down upon the high ground that hemmed the far side of the alley, which was not far at all; they could have stretched out their legs and touched their bare feet to the block and were careful to refrain from doing so. They spoke to each other and reached out for the clay bowls. Once those had been located, they began dissonant chants and one, from somewhere within her robes, produced offerings to fill them. While one offered stale bread, shredded tobacco leaf, and a bit of moldy sugar cane, the other leaned forward to scrape her thin-skinned digits across the pink granite, deepening, molecule by molecule, the tear-marks of the eye. Jon struggled to make out what the women were saying, but the dialect was difficult. Something about the eye—no, two eyes, their own, maybe—no, a grandchild’s, and pain, and (although Jon did not know the word) pus. These were grandmothers, coming to plead for the health of a grandson’s sight—no, a granddaughter’s. Jon was silently pleased with himself for having caught the distinction.

  An infant also came from somewhere within the robes. The baby too was wrapped, only the eyes left exposed. (These people were of a sect of the solar faith that believes the living are not worthy to expose face or body fully to God’s bountiful rays.) Jon had to turn away, for the baby’s eyes bubbled with pustules as big as mushrooms that wept some yellow stuff that Jon could smell from the doorway.

  Then: another voice, and Jon thought that a kópee, hitherto unnoticed, had accompanied the grandmothers. Jon struggled to understand these words too, wishing for Iánheh. After a minute, he heard the man speak, saying in Harábese what this other voice was saying in some obscure dialect of the kópees.

  Jon understood many of the words, some of which were arcane even by Harábese standards: names of herbs or minerals or gods, outlandish claims of divine identity, threats to godhood and existence. It was a type of ancient magical text being recited, the sort of thing done back in the day of the Fiáró-kings. If these spells had ever worked at all, they had degenerated by this modern day into generally unworkable curiosities.

  As for who was speaking that mummified kópee dialect, there was no one else visible. Jon at first suspected Iánheh, skilled at leger-de-man (to use the Provench term), of playing a trick, but this voice was exactly like that of a young man; Iánheh’s voice did not have that range. Jon then attempted to discern whether the man might be playing ventriloquist, but he heard both voices simultaneously. Over the ancient words, the Ópetian droned on in Harábese, as though reciting something he had long ago grown weary of repeating. If he were some type of oral illusionist, in that respect he was an exceptionally poor one, but that did not matter. The women mistook his indifference for a species of trance. They had come to present the ailing child to the presence of the words and expected no more.

  Jon became convinced that this was the work of a djinee. Now, in this day and age when sysdaimons are the common thing, communicated with through wires and gears and speaking-tubes and propitiation cups, there is sometimes misunderstanding regarding communication with the older and now rarer djinees, or, as they are often called in popular literature and newspapers, genies. In large part it is because, on the Euryborean continent and in the Pretish Isles, the genies most often encountered by the modern general public are those belonging to men in the fields of amusement and wonder. For them, misapprehension is stock in trade. In truth, no particular gift or knowledge, other than that of ordinary hearing or speech, is generally required to speak to djinees. Understanding djinees might be an entirely different matter, because many do not learn to express themselves in modern tongues. So what struck Jon most was not that the djinee was speaking some ancestor of the kópee tongue, but that this man of the solar faith understood what it was saying.

  Each blind woman kissed the mud-brick “ear” of the djinee, then the pink granite eye itself, murmuring what Jon made out to be “God’s mercy unto us and the same unto you.” Without a word directed toward their weary translator, they departed, insensible to the fact that a foreigner had observed them with keen interest and even a little sympathy.

  The Ópetian did not have the opportunity to take up the offerings left for the djinee before Jon seized him violently. “How,” Jon said to the startled man, “do you know the language of the kópees so well? You aren’t yourself a kópeet—”

  He shook off Jon’s grip and said, in Provench, “I shall wash out my ears with kerosene and burn them, you have offended them so!” He turned away as if stricken, not now by insult but by some even greater pain, and he gathered up the contents of the bowls, which he dumped into a basket. While he stacked the bowls in the house, Jon heard him murmur, in Harábese, “Yes, yes, why have I not thought of this before? God surely has sent this mad foreigner here to teach me a lesson.”

  “Listen,” Jon said in Provench, “I didn’t mean to gi
ve offense. I—I speak a little of the kópee tongue myself, and I’m a—a good Calosian man.”

  “God forgive you for both transgressions!” the Ópetian exclaimed, not having any reason to know that Reverend Hopewell, for example, did not think Jon especially guilty of his second claim. He placed a small checkered cloth over the basket and its pitiful contents.

  Jon, meanwhile, plotted some less physical means to delay the Ópetian’s departure. If this man made it out onto the street and departed the Oom-ál-Faqr, Jon risked losing important knowledge about the djinee and its block.

  The man did a curious thing that saved Jon the trouble. He stepped up into the little house and sat on the floor. “Spare me your assault, monsieor! I’ll give you what you want, satisfy your scientific curiosity. You are a man of science, I can tell. So am I—a chemist at the Polytechnic Institute!—though no one would know it here. It doesn’t matter if the djinee hears me, does it, do you think?” The man arranged his robes with an air of resignation. “The author of my misery knows the answer to your question in its own tongue!”

  Jon perched himself on the foorn and let his feet dangle and kick, gently, the old bricks. He thus worked out his impatience while the chemist took a few moments to collect his thoughts and shape them to a foreign vocabulary. In the telling he dipped into Harábese when Provench could not provide. At any rate, Jon understood.

  “When I was a younger man—younger than you, I’d wager—I had a sister who became very ill. My mother took her to every medical doctor in Qáreyá and beyond, even the foreign ones, but they could do nothing for her. We prayed and sought help from the seers, but they could say only God’s” (that is, the Sun’s) “will was at work, and then my mother said that no, God’s will was asleep. This greatly offended the seers, and my mother and father knew that from then on they would have to seek their answer elsewhere, if my sister were to live.

  “My mother sought out oracles of all sorts, and my father too, but it was my mother who went farther afield. She consulted even with those men of God, so-called, of yours, the missionaries. My father did what he could to keep himself clean of such influences, but even today, the seers and the other servants of God” (that is, the Sun) “will not take his offerings.

  “But that is now, and I speak of then. I was a young man then, as I said, and I asked my fellows at school. I had a wide circle of acquaintances even in those days, and I heard of this djinee. At the time there was an old woman who tended him, but she had grown too feeble to keep up the work. When I found her, she was laid upon that foorn there. I begged her to intercede on behalf of my little sister, but she could not. So I laid the offerings before the djinee and begged him myself.

  “And he spoke, but I couldn’t understand what he said. Gibberish! ‘Repeat to me what the god said,’ the old woman told me. The djinee said the same thing over and over again, and after a while I had committed the gibberish to memory. I repeated it back close into her ear—because she was very deaf, you understand—but she would not tell me what this gibberish meant. Not right away. After I had begged her, offered to marry any woman on earth she should name—even a barren one, even herself!—and even threatened her life, the old woman said to me that the djinee would cure my sister only if I took the old woman’s place as caretaker. ‘God forgive you and the djinee both for such a request!’ I cried. And do you know what the old woman said to me? Do you?”

  The chemist was standing now. Jon was not wholly comfortable sitting on the foorn, knowing that by the time the story was finished the old woman would be dead upon it. So he stood up. In this way, Jon and the chemist stood face to face.

  The chemist seemed to strain against a taut rope, unable to speak until Jon answered his question, which still hung in the air.

  Jon said, “I don’t know what the old woman said to you.” Though perhaps indeed he did.

  “She said, ‘God shall forgive you for agreeing to such a request!’ Oh, and I did agree to her request, and my sister grew well and my mother lived long enough to see her first grandson, upon whom my father still dotes, but whether God will forgive me—”

  Here he broke down into tears. He stormed outside and kicked dirt and refuse into the eye of the djinee—or rather, the eye on the block of the djinee. However trapped they are, however they identify with their places, djinees, creatures of subtle fire, must never be confused with the objects of earth they inhabit.

  Jon had a number of other thoughts about his immediate circumstances. One of them was this. Despite the circumstances of his itinerant youth, Jon had always been “bookish.” His father had encouraged him to read (it became good for the business he was in), even when the only things at hand were nursery books of fables and tattered penny dreadfuls. So, although this was not a fictional circumstance, Jon recognized that he stood at a sort of archetypal crossroad. He said to himself, “This man will surely try to trick me into taking his place as the djinee’s servant.”

  Most solicitously Jon said to the chemist, in Provench, “You made a noble sacrifice for the sake of your sister and for the life of your nephew too, and the happiness of your sister’s husband and your father. God will reward you for it, if He’s a just God.”

  This brought a flood of tearful praise for the Sun, called God, whose daughter (metaphorical) is Justice and Righteousness and Truth. This purge seemed to settle the chemist’s temperament, and in a short while he was back to what Jon thought of as the chemist’s rightful self, something presentable on the streets beyond the Oom-ál-Faqr.

  “You must tell me one thing, and then I’ll leave you and this place in peace,” said Jon, though he realized his lie. He had no more intention of leaving that block in situ than he did of becoming the djinee’s translator.

  The chemist sensed something vaguely of the sort, but he allowed Jon’s question anyway.

  “How can you know what the djinee is saying, if it is speaking the language of the kópees and you are not of that race?”

  The chemist shrugged wearily. Any offense that Jon might have given was nothing to him now. “I know because the old woman told me what the djinee says. That is all it ever says.”

  “The same thing? Day in, day out?”

  “The very same.” By this point the chemist was in sufficient good spirits to repeat the “gibberish,” and its translation, this time into Provench but with such extensive use of Harábese for the odd bits that he scarcely needed to have bothered. Upon concluding: “That is all it says, every time, the very same.”

  That seemed very unlikely to Jon, who, being well acquainted with djinees, could scarcely imagine such a mentally crippled creature. He began to reassess his conclusion that it was a djinee at all, although what other phenomenon that might produce such an effect eluded him. Mechanically, yes, he knew of phonographs and of the sysdaimons that operated within some of these devices, but, without moving parts, this creature would have to be something of an entirely different order.

  Jon concluded his conversation with the chemist on unexpectedly good terms and left him and the gibbering block. Iánheh met him at the mouth of the alley and brought him back out through the Oom-ál-Faqr. Although they discussed the matter in some depth, Iánheh could also offer no explanation for the djinee’s behavior. “An máeh! It is not a proper thing,” she declared. “He must be sick.”

  They parted company at the Bab-ál-Lámeh. That evening Jon ate his meal with Farrington, over conversations about some political items in the Emerish newspapers. He attempted a single discreet inquiry about djinees repeating single phrases, but Farrington had nothing to offer on the subject. After dinner, he cornered Walter Pendergast and asked how work on the Pink Chapel had progressed today.

  “Well enough, I suppose.” Pendergast chewed on the smokeless stump of a cheroot. “But it will only ever be second rate. I’m resigned to that.”

  Jon could scarcely contain himself. To his credit, as Pendergast dragged him off to play billiards, he said only: “Oh, I don’t know, Walter. Cheer
up! It might amount to something more.”

  * * *

  In the morning Jon still felt quite confident about his situation. He sought out Iánheh at the gate and asked if she knew whether there would be supplicants (he did not dare, quite, call them “worshippers”) at the block today. It was difficult to say, was the reply, but, having found the chemist’s teaching schedule posted at the Polytechnic Institute, she arranged to take him to the block at such an hour as none would likely be there.

  And indeed, as promised, before they had reached the Oom-ál-Faqr, they passed the chemist bound for the Polytechnic Institute: dressed in a Western fashion but for his tárboosh and turban, with no sign of his basket and its checkered cloth.

  When they reached the alley, Iánheh again let her sáyeed continue on alone. Jon considered this for a moment. Iánheh was a kópeet, and he wondered if the djinee was, for her, one of the gods of the lesser case. “Well,” Jon said to himself, “if she holds it to be so, that’s her business. She knows mine and exactly what it’s about and so can’t mind very much.”

  He pondered how to begin this conversation, if conversation were possible at all with the djinee. The words that the djinee did know seemed to be the best place to start. So he spoke the “gibberish,” understanding its sense but glad that Iánheh was not too close to overhear and harangue him for his accent and errors.

  When no reply forthcame, he repeated it several times. He reached down and touched the block at the channels worn by the fingers of old women.

  Undaunted by continued failure, from the pocket of his jacket he plucked out a sprig of grapes plundered from the Club’s breakfast-table. He laid this on the ground before the block. And still he gibbered. By now that had become a chant.

  Whereas the chemist’s chant evidenced boredom, Jon’s evolved an undertone of annoyance. Jon stepped up into the house. From the leg of his pants, he pulled a short iron bar. The other end of the block, which was blank, formed part of the interior face of the wall. He studied it. There was more than one way to capture the attention of a djinee. When language fails, leverage might succeed. So, although Jon knew he could not demolish the wall, he knelt and proceeded to pry at the block, gibbering all the while.