Текст книги "Quarantine"

Автор книги: Jim Crace

Соавторы: Jim Crace
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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

26

It was Aphas who saw Musa first, a little after dawn, coming slowly through the rocks towards the flattened tent, wearing his boots of mud, his hair heavy with sweat. He did not seem so big somehow, as if a single night of quarantine up at the caves had been enough to shorten and to narrow him. Even the goats could tell he had improved. They did not scatter when he walked amongst them as they usuaHy did. He did not try to kick their legs.

‘Your man is back,’ said Aphas, ‘Look.’ Mira looked, and so did Shim. They did not run to greet him, glad that he’d survived another illness and was well enough to walk. Their day-dreams perished at the sight of him. They stayed on the panels of the tent as if they thought the wind could strike up again at any moment, and waited for him to rage at what had happened to his home. Miri knew what he would do and say. He’d twist her wrist: ‘What use are you? Look what you’ve done in just one night.’ He would not be ashamed to slap her ears, even with Shim and Aphas looking on. He’d slap their ears as well, if he had half a chance.

But no, he merely shook his head and rolled the broken tent poles with his foot.

‘You’ll have to make another one,’ he said, ‘when we get down to Jericho.’ He looked at Miri, sitting amongst the few possessions she had rescued from the wind, the finished birth-mat on her lap, untied, her broken loom in pieces at her feet, her face and hair made ashen by the dust. ‘You’ll have to get another loom.’

‘How is your stomach, then?’ she said, still nervous of the man. ‘We prayed for you, I promise. We sang for you al night. . ’

‘Your prayers were answered. See? I’m well. The wind has blown all the pain away. My wind in here. .’ he rubbed his stomach, ‘. . became the wind outside. See what it’s done.’ He shrugged again, and spread his hands above the tent, a stoic almost. ‘This is the price we pay.’

What should they make ofMusa now? To those survivors at the tent, he seemed transformed. They all had been transformed by the bombast of the winds, of course. There’s nothing more dispiriting than clinging to a flattened tent at dawn with nothing looming up to help beyond the scrub except more scrub. They had been circled seven times in the night. The wind had sounded seven fanfares on its hom. And their skin city had been levelled to the ground. There are no kinder winds than that. There isn’t one that comes along and puts up tents. But Musa, they supposed, had more reason to be dispirited than any of them, if he was human. Even though he’d missed their dramas with the tent. He had been badly ill, and must be more humbled and exhausted by his struggles. The idea that the midnight wind had originated in Musa’s stomach did not seem far-fetched, to Aphas at least. His stomach waslarge enough to lodge a storm. And demons could take many shapes. A demon driven out of Musa’s gut where it was warm and comfortable might want to take revenge on Musa’s tent. That much was logical. He sympathized with that. What had his landlord said, those many days ago? ‘I only have to belch for there to be a storm.’ Perhaps he’d belched so great a storm that all his rage was spent against the scrub, and he was left as harmless and as fragile as a blown egg. An empty sheH.

Certainly, none of them had ever known the man so quiet. They had not thought that he could be pensive or melancholy. It hardly suited him. His heavy jaw seemed heavier. He’d lost the teasing chalenge in his eyes. He was distracted and reduced. Perhaps, his second meeting with mortality had made a better, lesser man of him.

Even so, Shim and Aphas kept their distance, and even Miri

– unwidowed for a second time – was slow to offer Musa her assistance, or to run around and find his food and drink amongst the scattered trappings. At last he said, ‘Bring me the flask.’ Perhaps date spirit would restore him, and give him courage. For reasons he could not understand, his passing encounter with the Gally had been frightening.

‘I don’t know where it’s gone,’ said Miri.

‘Hunt for it, then.’

Miri had still not found the flask amongst the salvaged remains of their property when there was a warbling noise, and the badu came running up, covered in dust and scratches. He was talking for a change, but not a language anybody knew. He seemed unusualiy excited, his tongue too small for what he had to say. He’s seen the Gally, Musa thought. Or else he’s seen me coming out of Marta’s cave. He’s seen her bruises. It’s just as well that he can’t talk. But the badu was not pointing to the valley of the caves. He was pointing to the precipice. He caught hold of Shim’s wrist and tugged.

‘What is it, now? Let go.’

He pulled Aphas to his feet, and tugged him for a few paces towards the promontory. He did the same to Shim. And when Shim shook him off, the badu got hold of the curly staff and handed it to Musa. Again he pointed to the precipice, and mimed a prayer. He waved his hand towards the precipice, walked off a dozen paces, beckoned them to follow him across the scrub.

‘He wants us to walk,’ suggested Shim.

‘What for?’ said Musa. ТП not walk another step today.’ ‘Something to do with the Galilean boy.’

‘The Galilean boy has gone already. I saw him walking. This monung. ’

‘ Whodid you see?’

‘The Gaily. Walking.’

‘Walking where?’ asked Aphas, terrified of what he might have missed during his night-long absence from his cave. ‘Have you been healed by him? What did he say? Where is he now?’

Musa shrugged. He shook his head. ‘Nothing. .’

‘You saw him, though?’

‘I saw him, yes. He shows himself to me. He’s there, somewhere. Up at the caves. Unless he’s gone into the hiils.’

‘We didn’t see him pass,’ said Shim. ‘We didn’t hear him walking. And we’ve been here al night.’

Musa wouldn’t argue with Shim. He only said, ‘He’s silent when he moves. .’

The badu gave up on the men. But Miri was easier to drag along the ground, and more easily persuaded by the badu’s grimaces and cries.

‘Go with him, then,’ said Musa. ‘See what the noise is al about. Leave me in peace to think. Yes, go. See if my flask has blown over there.’

It wasn’t long before she had returned from her first visit to the promontory, leaving the badu on the cliffs. ‘You’d better come and see,’ she said. ‘There’s someone dead.’ Musa’s mouth was hanging open. He looked stunned. He’s been caught out telling lies, thought Miri. She was pleased. He shows himsefto me,indeed. I saw him walking, earlier this morning.How had her husband hoped to benefit from teiling lies like that?

At first they could not see the body lying on the rock outside the cave. The dust had made the landscape ail the same colour; the shapes were indistinguishable. But they could see the ravens picking at some carrion, and hear the tok-tok of their beaks. The body was beneath the birds.

‘That’s him,’ said Musa, clasping his hands tightly to stop them trembling. He felt as if his head was full of bees.

‘Who was walking? You said. Up at the caves,’ asked Aphas.

Musa stuck his chin out and shrugged. ‘That was him, too,’ he said tentatively. ‘I must have seen the ghost pass out ofhim. Unless I dreamed it. Might have dreamed it. You know I’ve not been well.’ He tried to recoilect the figure, gliding on the mud. Had he really seen a living face? Had he seen anyone at all, or was his conscience playing tricks on him? His memory was far too faint and imprecise to be entirely sure. Even if he shut his eyes he could only picture Gaily spread out on the rocks with ravens on his face. And ifhe opened them and looked across the precipice towards the cave, the picture was the same. Whatever Musa had seen that morning, one thing was certain now; the Gaily was beyond help.

They waited on the promontory and watched the badu climb down to the Gaily’s cave with ropes and cloths to save the body from the birds. The badu did not seem afraid of death or ravens. They stood their ground, with bloody beaks, and stabbed at the badu’s arms. But he swept them off and picked the corpse up in his a^s as if it were no heavier than a stook of reeds – indeed, it was no heavier than reeds – and wrapped it in the tom tent curtain which had once divided Miri from her husband. The Gaily’s naked feet protruded from the cloth, like some small boy playing hide-and-seek behind a tapestry.

The badu tied the wrapped body with rope, secured an extra line to it and climbed once more up to Shim at the rim of the precipice above the cave. They pulled the body up, past the overhanging rock, the canker thorn, the crumbling contours of the cliff. The ravens made their last assault onJesus’s protruding, swinging feet, but nothing could prevent the burial of Jesus now.

‘No need to dig a grave,’ said Musa, coming up with Aphas and his wife to join the other two. ‘We have a grave. My little donkey’s grave. It must be meant for him … It was always meant for him.’

‘You mean we should use the cistern?’ said Shim.

‘It was a grave before it was a cistern.’

‘What will we drink?’

Musa shrugged. He didn’t care what anybody drank. He wouldn’t stay another day and so he didn’t need to know about their thirst.

‘You can’t bury him in the water that we drink,’ persisted Shim.

‘Whose land is this? Go somewhere else for water. Go down to Jericho and drink your fill. There’s an empty cave below that you can have for free, if you’re not frightened of those birds. Climb down. Do what you want. But this man has a grave already dug for him.’

Shim and the badu carried Jesus to the tent and rested there while Miri gathered extra water-skins to fill before they used the cistern. She found some food for them to eat as weU, and some blanket cloths. Everyone would have to spend the night in caves. The tent was useless now.

They took the body through the pans of mud and up the scarp, with Musa, Miri and Aphas following as mourners. They should have put a flower on the Gaily’s lips, but there were none left standing. They had to make do with some blackened poppy petals. And then they put the body in the same cave that Musa had used the night before, for safe keeping, until everything was ready for his burial. They blocked off the entrance with uprooted thorns, and lit a fire close by to keep the flies away. The wood was damp; its smoke was black, then purple-grey, the proper colour for a funeral.

‘Where’s Marta?’ Miri asked.

27

‘You’d better make a sacrifice to speed the Gaily on his way,’ said Musa.

Shim and Aphas nodded warily. Their landlord was being uncharacteristically comradely with them; anything to hold their attention and keep their minds off his wife. They could hear Miri searching in the rock falls beyond the caves, caUing ‘Marta, Marta,’ with rising desperation in her cries. But Musa raised his own voice to drown hers out. He did not want the men to help Miri. If one of them found Marta alive, sobbing and bruised, what might he ask her? What might she reply?

It would suit Musa if he never saw the woman again. He was angry with her. She had not been sensible. Ifshe’d had any brains she would have packed her few belongings and set off home already, saving trouble and embarrassment for everyone. But Miri had searched inside the cave and Marta’s clothes were still there. A woman would not leave without her spare clothes. So she was either hiding in the scrub, or something bad had happened to her. Something fatal, Musa hoped. She brought these problems on herself If she were dead, they’d have to hold a double burial, the Gaily and the woman in one grave. She could be a handmaiden for Jesus for eternity. An honour, actually. Too good for her. But if she were stil alive, then the very sight of her would spoil the Gaily’s funeral. Musa wanted to despatch the healer with proper, blameless piety. He did not want his little sins to stand as mourners at his side.

‘You cannot send him to his maker without a sacrifice,’ said Musa, breaking his own silence. ‘Come on, come on. What will you do for him?’

‘What kind ofsacrifice?’ asked Shim. Was this to be a sacrifice ofprinciple or dignity or money? He was running short, although he still had some coins hidden in his cloak, and didn’t want to part with any.

‘What do these people sacrifice? Their daughters, probably. Some animal, then. We have to spill a little blood for the man, to wet our funeral prayers. That’s how it’s done in the Galilee. They take an ox and slit its throat.’

‘Regrettably, I cannot lead you to an ox,’ said Shim, much relieved. ‘I haven’t noticed any oxen hereabouts. .’

‘There are your goats,’ said Aphas helpfully. ‘^Kil one. It would be generous.’

‘Wasteful, too,’ said Musa. ‘And only generous for me. What would be your part in it?’ He would not agree to sacrificing merchandise, not even for the Gaily. Goats provided milk and meat and fuel and skin. Killing one without a proper purpose would be a four-fold waste. ‘Send him,’ he lifted his chin towards the badu. ‘He’s the hunter, isn’t he? He’s already poached enough birds and deer from off my land. Send him to catch something for us. I think I can afford him that.’

Musa threw a stone at the badu to draw his attention. ‘Explain what we want,’ he said to Aphas. ‘He’s used to you.’ He watched the old man mime the catching and the slaughter of an animal. The badu did not seem to understand. He grinned and shook his head, until Musa took his ornamental knife out of its cloth and made a motion with its blade across his throat, followed by the hand-sign for a prayer. Then the badu nodded. ‘See, he’s not as stupid as he looks,’ said Musa. ‘How could he be?’

The badu hurried off towards the valey. He’d almost understood. He was to catch a bird for Jesus. The smalest funeral offering. He had mistaken Musa’s praying hand-sign to be a bird, the fingers pressed together like closed wings, the thumbs protruding like a little head. The badu knew exactly what to do. Catching birds was easy. He’d been doing it for years.

He ran down to the tent and hunted through the goatskins until he found Miri’s cooking chest. He popped a little cube of hard salt between his lips, and unravelled a fraying length of green cotton thread from one of Musa’s ruined samples. He wrapped the thread around his finger and tiptoed amongst the goats, which had been let loose to graze on the tattered fabrics and any food that they could find. To anyone that watched it would seem that he was whispering in their ears, more evidence of lunacy. A madman speaking to the goats. What did he want with them? To tether them with his thin thread? To strangle one of the goats for Jesus, perhaps?

The badu searched the goats until he found one with a blood– fi.lled tick in the skin folds of an ear. Easy to see, but not so easy to get out. Some smoke, blown from a burning stick, would usually make a tick detach itself. But the badu hadn’t any smoke. Instead he took the now softened cube of salt out of his mouth. He crumbled it into the goat’s ear and rubbed it into the skin. Salt was better than smoke for catching ticks. A goat with a burning ear would not stay still. The tick, however, hated salt. It contracted, darkened, and fell into the badu’s palm. That was the easy part.

The hard part was to tie the thread around the tick’s abdomen without popping its blood sac, and without the tick attaching itselfto the badu’s finger. But he was practised. He had harnessed hundreds of ticks since he was small. He could have pulled a chariot with them.

The badu took the fastened tick into the nearest stand of thorns. What little rain there’d been in the night had tempted last year’s seeds to hazard their first green shoots. Insects, tempted by the moisture and the exposed sap of wind-snapped branches, competed for a meal. So did the birds. Finches, wheatears, warblers had come from nowhere to gorge themselves. And there were circling hawks, of course, waiting for the plumpest opportunity.

The badu put his tick on an exposed flat rock amongst the bushes, a little grape of blood, and weighed the thread down with a stone, a finger-length from the tick. It could not wiggle away, out of the unforgiving light. It couldn’t even fall very far, but it hadjust freedom enough to advertise itselfwith its struggles. It didn’t like the thread around its abdomen; it didn’t like the sun. The badu backed away, downwind, running the remainder of the thread through his fingers, until he found a hiding place behind a bush where he could not be seen but from where the twisting tick was visible. Now he would fish himself a bird.

He was an expert at keeping still, though anyone who’d seen him in the past thirty days, running in the rocks, tugging his hair and hands unceasingly, would have been amazed that one so plagued by movement and loose limbs could be so quiet and patient when it suited him. Perhaps the truth was this: he was a madman only when observed, the cussed opposite of those who conspired to be rational in company and cultivate their manias alone. The badu, without any witnesses to click their tongues at him and shake their heads, appeared entirely sane. He crouched beneath a thorn bush in the scrub, a blood tick offered on a thread to passing birds. And he was happy, too. He had his plans. He’d do his duty to the Gaily who had died, and then he’d make a rich man of himself

It wasn’t long before a banded wheatear came, a male, on its way north to breed. For al its mating splendour, its damask eye plumes and its black flights, it was tired from its long journey, and glad to have such easy and nourishing prey. The trick, it knew, was not to peck the tick. The bulb ofblood would burst.

Instead, the wheatear turned its head and took the tick whole. It lifted up its head to let the feast fall into its crop.

The trick for the badu was to wait. Ifhe pulled on the thread too soon, before the wheatear’s throat had ended its spasm of swallowing, the tick would pop out of its mouth again, without the blood. If he puiled on the thread too late, the wheatear’s flight might be strong enough to snap the cotton. The badu waited until the wheatear spread its wings, two beats, and then he jerked the thread. The wheatear tumbled in the air, and fell on to its back. The badu was already there. The bird was his. Not quite the perfect sacrifice, of course. Not quite as generous as a goat, not quite as heavy as an ox. But better than no sacrifice at aH.

The badu only broke one wing so that the wheatear could not fly away. He held it, quivering, in both hands. It didn’t peck at him for long. Only its trembling chest showed that it was still alive. He snapped the thread off at its beak and carried the bird to the men, waiting at the grave. They were disappointed. They had hoped that he would catch a little deer at least.

‘If that’s the best that this mean land will offer us, then damn it and so be it,’ Musa said. ‘We’ll make do.’

‘This is, undoubtedly, the meanest place I’ve ever seen,’ said Shim, with feeling, kicking at the stones and waving his hands around at all the unrewarding wilderness, the unremitting sun, the unrelenting landlord. He was already persuading himselfthat it was time to leave.

It was not fair of them to blame the scrub for being stingy with everything except for space and light and stone. Even if it had not displayed much magnanimity towards the men, it had, at least, been generous to Miri. It had not maddened her or lamed her, yet. It had not made her il or thin. In fact, she was the only one of them to put on any weight during the thirty days. It had allowed her to complete her birth-mat; there’d been delights in that, despite the wools. And, in the night, it had even conspired with the wind to free her from the family tent. An act of charity.

But Miri was exceptional. She had bewitched the scrub on her first day. They were equals in their plainness and their endurance. Usually it was a less forgiving, more dogmatic host, despising doubt and mocking faith at once, and favouring the predatory, whatever their beliefs. It was even-handed in its cruelties. It did not no^ally discriminate between the donkey and the mule. It did not prefer the vulture to the crow. It did not favour hennaed hair over blond. It did not hang its trees with food or fil its hoHows up with drink to make life easy for its guests. The scrub required its passengers to take care of themselves or go without. The scrub was economical, as well, like some old man, and boundless in its barrenness and poverty. Its air was thin; its earth was pale; its weeds were frayed; its moods were fractious and despairing.

But there was also something rich, at times, about the scrub, despite itself. Something sustaining, unselfish, fertile even. Perhaps this was because it made no claims. It did not promise anything, except, maybe, to replicate through its array ofabsences the body’s inner solitude and to free its tenants and its guests from their addictions and their vanities. The empty lands – these very caves, these paths, these desert pavements made of rock, these pebbled flats, these badlands, and these unwatered river beds – were siblings to the empty spaces in the heart. Why else would scrubs have any holy visitors at all? Ten thousand quarantiners had come to these parched hills and passed their days, some delirious with iHness; others feverish with god, and guilt and lunacy, unraveHed from themselves by visions of a better and eternal world; the rest made mad by fasting. Yet, at the end of their forty days, the scrub sent al of them away enriched and dryly irrigated. Even Aphas. Even Shim.

But the chosen one or two, the very few, were rewarded for their quarantines with sacred revelations. The scrub allowed them up its steep and narrow tracks, and through the softened silhouettes ofhills, to their attending gods. And there it stretched its grey horizons to reveal what far-off armies were approaching with their spangling phalanxes of spears, what distant kings and preachers came with gifts and prophecies, how slow and never-ceasing was the world. And there it gave its voyagers their glimpse of paradise.

Jesus had achieved these sacred fields and seen horizons on horizons without end. He was still there.

And Musa, too. Yes, even Musa – especially, Musa – had had his glimpse of paradise and felt the fingers of his preacher king. He would not go back with nothing to declare. The scrub would not return him empty-handed to his market-places. What greater generosity than that?