She jumped off the cliff, and into the sea. A perfect dive, down, down, and away. But he daren't jump after her. He decided to to wade into the sea from the beach, and so tried to find his way down to the shore. But the only road led to the village, a this-way that-way seaside place, and none of the roads led to the sea. He remembered the cut of the back of her one-piece bathing suit, a perfect parabola, scarlet red, but he couldn't find his way to the sea. Travelling in circles around the alleys of the village, he realised that she was gone.
That man sat in a public house and worried about the seagulls. The way they flew, it was as if they could see lines scored in the air. But he had studied mathematics, and so lines were everywhere in his world -- they hung around him like a robe, or a snare of spider's silk, and were as real as the air before a storm. Still, the seagulls hung in the cliff-wind, and he worried about their brains.
Where were the lines which he saw the gulls describe? Were they in his mind? Certainly. Were they in the mind of the gulls? Perhaps. So was he talking to the birds? And where was she now? Was she west of Ireland? beyond the continental shelf?
If there are things in your mind, curves and lines, or words and pictures, or smells and sounds -- such as fish and eagles -- and there are also things in the mind of another -- curves, fish, eagles -- and then the other selects one of these things out of the plurality, and acts out a role, through a preoccupation with that chosen thing, because it is wedged at the front of their mind ... if, if, if, if.
It was a skive off early Friday, a catch an the early coach Friday. And the bend, the bend was innocuous enough. It was an inconsequential place for an work-a-day road traffic accident. Two people died, but nobody knew who they were. The cars behind the accident, they could turn around, but the coach had no room to turn. As the smaller vehicles retreated, the coach slowly shuffled towards the carnage, to the steel, glass, and meat. Steel, glass and meat, like the place where he worked, but less linear, and more dead.
The rain bowed his head in shame, as he stepped down from the coach. A policeman approached and asked if he had abandoned a car. He had not, and was allowed to pass with caution. Wreckage: rocks, storms, and staves.
If that First selects from the many things which populate its mind, and acts in some way because of that, and a Second sees the First, and something is brought forward in their mind, because of the action of the first -- if all these things happen, as they improbably do -- then surely that is all of communication? The linking of minds: so easy to say, but so amazing to consider.
Pubs in quiet hours, where recently separated mathematicians drink and worry, they are the strangest of places. The greater the quantity of customers, the less the variety. People who ebb and flow through the doorway in these quiet times are the news at five AM. A reporter in Kurgistan is suggesting, through the phasing of fitful sleep, that something important has happened, involving diesel and the WTO; and perhaps also robotic kittens, but that could just be the drugs, or the fever, or the dream. They hang like the air before a storm -- drugs, fevers, dreams -- like a robe or snare of spider's silk: curved.
A tall man in a trenchcoat and cavalry boots orders bitter from the bar. Outside the pub he sees the cavalryman's horse, tied to a parking meter placated with an appropriate fee. What can the Mathematician say concerning horses? What is the special thing with horses? Because he is Indoeuropean?
You couldn't avoid stepping on them, in 1974, the ladybirds, the red spotted ladybirds. You tried not to: it was cruel. But there was nothing else to be done. Wherever you walked, there was a crunching sound, in the river of ladybirds, in the river of red, the river of brake lights, broken lights, the river of blood and sinew, the lights extinguished, and it stained your soul. The rain made him bow his head, that skive off early Friday as he picked his way through the wreckage.
She was sure to be out of sight of land by now. Her red costume with its parabolic back. And he was in a pub, nursing something mild, and worrying about the seagulls hanged on the cliffside. The cavalryman stood at the bar, and supped his pint.
There was a story, half remembered, about a bird at someone's liver; they were tied to a rock. He had seen a chain, himself, attached to a rock on the East Cliff, but with no one restrained on the far end. It beat its cankered links against the rust-stained rock with every coming and going of the wave.
Where is the curve? Is it hanging in the air? The gull chose one path over another, whatever its reason, and the man in the pub saw the path and, by variations, saw what was being said. But were the birds talking to him? What more is there to talking than a light touch on the reigns, guiding another's brain as your own?
Anu, who was the highest of the Gods -- above the wind and the seaside and a woman swimming around and around the world -- Anu decreed there should be a feast. And so there was. Ereshkigal, who was the Queen of the Underworld -- where the rain washes your ladybirds into a storm drain on the A428 -- heard of the feast and asked for an invitation. But the shore is nowhere for wreckage, and Anu said that she must not come.
The unbound chain hit itself, in hatred, against the rock.
What's needed, he decided, as well as all of that, is a key. A key, or a horse: a horse tied to a parking meter on a windswept promenade. The strange thing about horses is their status.
The seagull and he, he decided, must share one thing in common, (or perhaps it must be two), keys, and all else can follow from there. He could hold the null hypothesis, information was being transfered between them, but was he hearing the gull? What mattered now was not the shapes which he was undoubtedly recording, but the question of something shared, long before the bird's flight.
She swam involuntarily. She had plummeted off of the cliff involuntarily, In her nose she wore a septum ring, like an ox, and one fine gold chain connected that ring to the setting limb of the sun. He saw the chain only as a streak of light on the water, but as the sun set in the west that first chain had pulled her from the cliff-top. It had not been an act of intent, not even an abdication to fate, but a heave by that first chain, attached to the sun. The second chain, fine and gold, was attached to a fish hook, and the hook in turn to a fish, The fish in its pain swam with all its might, dragging the hook further into its flesh and the swimming woman further away from land. It had been the fish which had buoyed her body when she had first hit the water. Also, a third chain.
Now beyond the site of accident, he tried to find a phone. It was a few years before the era when everyone owned a mobile, so he scanned the horizon for a building of some kind. Heading vaguely westwards, along a drive almost at a tangent to the road, he reached a rambling house, revealed as a nursing home, and he had a hard time finding his way inside. There were two doors which looked as if they were fire-escapes, but they couldn't be opened from outside. There must be a public entrance: Reception? He only wanted to use a phone. He walked around the building, which was convoluted and often concave, and couldn't find its entrance.
But Anu -- who was the highest of the gods -- said to his chamberlain: `you must descend into the underworld, Kakka, and say that Ereshkigal may send forth a representative, in lieu of attending my feast. And that representative can collect whatever he wishes from my table -- in a paper bag -- and take it back to the underworld'. And Kakka descended the long stairway of heaven. `Keeper of the first gate, open your gate.' And the gate was opened to Kakka. At the second gate, the same. At the third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh, Kakka was admitted. Even into the eighth and ninth, he was admitted.
The mathematician realised that there are just two places in the world which are precisely her shape: her body, so studied, and the water which now surrounded her. If she were to suddenly be no more -- wherever she was at that time, somewhere south of Iceland perhaps -- then what would remain in the water would be a perfect inversion of her body, a hollow which you could slip into like a glove. And then in an instant it would collapse and be transformed, by some strange alchemy, into a single life within a teaming population of eddies and turbulences which comprises the sea.
The chain, they say, to which no one was tied, had been there for a hundred years. It was the end of a cable ferry, from the days before the swing bridge. Only a few yards of it left, draped from the rock, and tied there by a ring, battering itself till its rust was transferred to its tormentor.
It would be a sudden collapse; then just curling rotational flow. The curve of her body, the turbulent sea, information flows from one to the other. But do they talk?
There was a firedoor which was open ever so slightly, and so he had stepped inside, and found himself in a long corridor with residential rooms on either side. Some were open, and a few of the residents were wandering along the corridor. The hospice was a home for the demented, and he looked a little dazed and confused. For a while he stood at the entrance of the corridor and saw no staff; watching the residents as they shuffled from no one place to no other.
After passing through the seven gates, Kakka, Anu's chamberlain, dressed in a spider's robe of curves and lines, met with Ereshkigal, Queen of the Ladybirds. Ereshkigal proclaimed the greatness of Anu and his family and house. Kakka agreed that, yes, they were all rather excellent people up there in heaven, and that, actually, it was true, Ereshkigal's kingdom was a bit sordid by comparison. And Queen of glass, and steel, and meat now cooling in the rain was pleased with Anu's plan, and she spoke to her chamberlain, Namtar, and said that he must ascend to heaven and take Anu's takeaway bag of feast-food, and he must be most terribly grateful. Ereshkigal, by circumstance, must grab what she could, and what price false praise when she owned not a single word?
If only he had had the courage to jump. When he had stood by the roadside, years earlier -- buses cracking gutter-water in the sodium night -- and he had hugged her, as friends parting, and as he withdrew his arms....
A movement she makes with her hands, he imagined, and a hole she makes in the water: perfect counterparts. Do they talk to each other, her and the sea? Can she feel what passes over that barrier of shape and inverted-shape? And does she understand what is being said? And does she speak in return? Do they learn, the sea and her, from their conversations? Do they have that one thing shared? Perhaps from the womb?
Her third nose-chain was attached to the ferry-cable, but the chain was also fine, and so golden that from his plausible, pubside vantage, he had mistaken its connection for a faint glimmer on the water. This third chain dragged at her body, presented resistance to progress. And the three chains pulled at her, in her red one-piece swimsuit, as she followed their path, well broken-in against the forces they exerted on her septum. And the three chains wrapped around her in the curling sea, and lulled her, and drove the will from her, and the sea moved her, in her cradle, as it would.
If he could speak to the gulls in their flight over the cliffs, he could ask if they had seen her? Approaching the east coast of Greenland perhaps? What if he could talk to the waves that beat the rocks? Could he understood the beating of the ferry cable, as it battered itself against its anchorage?
Sit on the hard shoulder of a motorway, about five feet in from the slow lane. Face away from the traffic, and wait, on a quiet day. You hear a rumbling behind you. He looked again at the cavalryman, looked up from his pint, and from the tormenting communicative gulls. What a strange thing to do, to ride a horse into town.
They're indentured, but glorious in their service. The only place that survives, against everything we believe in -- temple slaves, anchorites and martyrs. And horses. Why horses? It's almost the same as with dogs. Not quite. The smaller dogs, they certainly lack the will be be free. But even the larger breeds (seemingly willing in their place in the pack), seem to exist, somehow, in a relationship of exchange of labour, a much more conventional life.
Eventually, a nurse came and saw him; directed him to a telephone. He knew that he shouldn't stare: but he did, from the corners of his eye. The phone rang unceasingly at the far end, to be replaced by an recorded message. He replaced the receiver, and conversed telegraphically with the nurse. There had been an accident, and he thought there were two people who seemed at least very poorly, and that the police, and ambulances, and the fire brigade were already on the scene. Authorities were in control. He wanted to tell the nurse how the steel, and glass, and meat surreally reminded him of his place of work. He held back.
When you hear that rumbling sound behind you on the road, which grows louder, at first consuming the natural sounds; and then all of your hearing; next then the tarmac beneath you, until its surface seems as fluid as the sea; and finally when the sound consumes the air in a rush of wind which threatens to topple you into the path of whatever approaches you from behind.
She will be tiring now; running short of sustenance. Perhaps she will stop and float for a while, with the floes off the shore of Greenland? If she doesn't float or swim, then she will sink. But she will not sink, he was certain. He inspected the froth on his pint, in the dark-wood pub: cavalryman still supping at the bar.
So Namtar, car crash chamberlain, ascended the long stairway of heaven, to grab Anu's gifts. And when he arrived, all the gods knelt before him, because that was only polite, and spider robes owe grudging debt to spider webs. But one god refused to kneel before Namtar, the god Nergal. Nergal saw no merit in things of flesh, and fury, and head-bowing rain. Anu nudged Nergal, in case his slight had been caused by inattention, but Nergal refused to kneel, proud as he was of his purity. So livid Namtar descended the stairway of heaven. He fumed before the first gate; he raged before the second; screamed before the third; hammered at the fourth; charged at the fifth; and wailed at the sixth; at the seventh and eighth he screamed; but by the ninth he had entrapped his fury within plans for his tongue.
He had hugged her, as friends parting, at the junction where their homes lay along separate paths.
It's only then that your eyes get assailed, long after your hearing. You are smaller than the wheels, which are, in turn, so insignificant compared to the body of the truck. Wheels which could run you as flat as a rainy sunday afternoon, just five feet from you. They turn, surely out of control, (sound, fury: signifying?) A shared secret before the encounter?
She turned and rolled, in her flight, like the gulls, and wrapped her self in her three gold chains, as she swam westwards. She would not collide with America, because she had never thought of the place, so the Atlantic becomes the Pacific without the interruption of land.
And as he withdrew his hands, he brushed the top of her hips. Both hands at once, for a moment, rested on her waist and he felt the bone of her hips. And for a moment, for just an instant of thought, he saw the lie of her skeleton in his mind, the tension of her muscles, and that flash of experience overcame him like the sound and sight of the motorway lorry approaching from behind, fearful and all-encompassing, and threatening to squeeze you as flat as that Sunday afternoon.
A powerful bomb explodes over the town. She intercedes between them, the man and his bomb, and the last thing which he sees is the opacity of her skeleton, and then, for a decade, he's blinded to everything -- blinded to her.
As no one had answered the phone, he had to continue to walk home: only six miles to go. But these were six country miles; miles unprotected from monkish, cowling rain. No traffic for hitching: the road being closed.
After an hour, or so, he had walked two and a fraction miles. A car pulled past him, from behind. It slowed and, shouting from his widow, the driver asked the walker wanted a lift. He was surprised by the offer, as people rarely offer such things, unbidden, and his surprise made him wary, and so he declined. The driver was quite insistent. He stopped, and leant over the passenger side to open the window nearest the walker.
A handful of soil, crumbling and moist, falls through your fingers to the earth. Beside the path, scrubland becomes shrubs, become trees. There are days now, mere days. Years and months exist only as fractions, and the trees grow taller, and block out the sun. Their foliage grows darker, more sinister, glossy, coarser, less forgiving. Brambles and vines warn against retreat, or deviation from the path, as the path itself shrinks narrower, less stony, and deeper. Around him, an encirclement of holy and ivy, flowers growing large and grotesque. Everywhere, bindweed, and night-scented flowers, jasimne and stocks.
A gap to the road opens to the left, where he can see the driver and pedestrian eyeing each other with suspicion. But he cannot join them, as the soil is rising up on each side, forming a bank, and shards of moonlight break through the encircling trees, and cut him. They draw blood from his limpening arms. Soil rises, he grows flaccid and falls yards from the road.
Unknown feet away, the walker was frightened, and became insistent, he did not want a lift home. In the back of his mind (though he would not admit it) the walker was certain that such carnage as he had seen could only have been the work of conscious agency. For if lines and curves are real, if pressure gradients and winds are real, and hang in the air between meteorologists and gulls; if turbulence and eddies are real, and if they torture ferry chains against rocks; even if words and symbols are real, communicated between people, in common pains and joys; if any or all of these things are real, then devils and demons are real, and hang in the air as concrete as a piano-wire across the road, ready to decapitate generals in their staff cars.
Namtar arrived at his mistress' court, and vented his fury. With passion he told Ereshkigal of Nergal's refusal to bow. Ereshkigal mocked Namtar's presumption. She asked him, though her giggles, if Namtar, a messenger, fancied himself as a god; if he sought the power to decide the fate of mortals; to apportion judgement; to determine wise counsel?
The mathematician examines the scratches in the veneer of the old pub table, running his nail along the cracks. As a child, on the edge of a village, the fields extended to the horizon, each with its paths, ditches, and hedge-holes; day after day, he'd permute his course between school and home. The cavalryman finishes his pint, and slams his glass onto the bar. He turns, in his crisp spurred boots, and walks into the street. The door slams shut behind him. The mathematician expects to hear hooves in the distance, but the sound fails to arrive.
Lying grounded, with only days to go, vines trace his flesh, and the earth forms banks around his body. Raw land follows behind pioneering shoots, and his mouth is plugged with dirt. He inhales, and the smooth desiccating soil, full of vitality, euphorically substitutes for air. Forgetmenots and primroses sprout from his mouth. Still living, still conscious, passive, and immobile, bindweed schemes and gathers, winding its plots against the sun. Waiting on the edge of his body, its heavy flowers stand furled and erect, waiting.
Dragging a heavy velvet proscenium curtain in her wake, the three-chained woman swims, half forgotten, in her red parabolic swimsuit. Grey atlantic becomes blue pacific, and kingfishers build nests in halcyon calm. Bubbles froth on the ocean's surface, mumble in plaques, and are blown to the shores of islands amongst reefs. Unknown cultures, savage and human, anticipate the arrival of a chained swimmer by an auguring of foam.
Of the family Coccinellidae, they are small, round insects, often with brightly coloured wing-cases, considered beneficial owing to their diet of aphids, and scale insects, which are common garden pests.
She ordered Namtar, who stood humbled by her tirade, to return to the gods of heaven, and to fetch Nergal, the dissenter. So, Namtar returned through each of the nine gates of hell in turn, rose to the sky, and caused a great deal of consternation in heaven. Anu soon ordered that Nergal must obey Ereshkigal's wishes. He must descend to earth from heaven and, from there, below through the nine gates of hell, to travel with worms through the rotting places, and to face Ereshkigal, and account for his slight. Pompous Nergal, cloistered son of heaven, became greatly afraid, and the greater gods determined they must offer him assistance.
As the debris from the bomb settles; as the toxic dust falls patiently to earth; as she recedes from his grasp; she trails behind her beating streams of ribboned colour, which together form a train. Over the rubble she walks, as sure footed as a muse of gravitation; walks over the twisted concrete, which is grey, callow, and ashamed, blasted from former glories by the impact of their momentary meeting and parting at the parting of their roads; trails red, yellow, and blue in her wake; streamers fifteen feet long.
A mound of rubble which he had judged impassible: as landscape, backdrop, or cyclorama, she climbed with only a few powerful strides. This was, for him, a layer violation, an optical mystery, as unusual as planes hitting towers. There was a place for people and their actions; one for the landscape upon which they stood; and third for the skies. Their confluence of these layers in everyday life was surely a mere trick of the eye to be untangled? A conceit violated by her extraordinary act.
Reaching the summit, she surveyed the damage which the two of them had caused, her streamers still trailing behind her. Personified landscape, she paused for a moment, turned, and descended out of sight. As she was turning, the streamers whipped around her body with a surprising rigidity, only to resume their caressing of the crumbled rock as she descended beyond the rubble, as if slowly into the earth. A final flicker of red, and she was gone. Amongst the remains, families started to dig through the rubble.
Still tracing the table's footpaths with his finger, the mathematician cocks his head, struggling for a while to hear the sound of hooves in the distance. So determined is he to discern the sound of the cavalryman above the general din of the seaside town that he begins to recall the percussive rhythm of hooves on a road, the better to compare such imagined sound to any distant fractional noise. But soon his desire betrays him, his invocation gathers strength, and these imaginary horses completely overwhelm his mind, so that he could miss a passing cavalcade in his confusion.
She pulls herself onto the tropical beach, her red bathing suit dripping saline pacific streams, and sits on that beach at the water's edge. The three gold septum chains, the first tied to the sun, the second to the fish, and the third to the old chain ferry, now pull in triagonal opposition, and exert no force upon her body, restricting her only to stay in this place of freedom, at this quiescence, this zero. She sits for an hour in complete silence, on this soundless island, and thinks of nothing. Suddenly, a chaos of noise bursts inside her mind, the sound of a thousand wrens and finches disturbed into agitated flight, and as the beating of wings fades, she is gone.
But still he stands on the rain-soaked road, and watches the small blue car, stopped and idling a little way ahead, its exhaust condensing in the saturated air, as if a matador facing a bull.
He cannot explain good deeds. There is more luck, more altruism, and more grace in the world than the walker can readily explain and so, nothing is more suggestive of dubious supernature, of unknown actors, and of ulterior motivation (in short, there is no greater fuel for his paranoia) than unexpected luck. And never has he been more aware of the existence of that substratum of pain, wreckage, and physics available to any disreputable being than in the past two miles of of his life.
This man, in his smoking car, is a devil in a tin can; a devil who, perhaps with hidden magic, created those hateful mangled graves half an hour behind him and, by some similar act of cunning, escaped the attentions of the police. And now that very demon -- murderer, wrecker, ensnarer of minds -- offers him a lift into town. How should he respond? It isn't much further along the road that the final descent begins to town and the sea. The walker fancies he can hear the distant sound of gulls.
Feet away from this stand-off, behind a narrow screen of old trees, a living being is absorbed into the earth. Bindweed has encircled him, and has dragged him under. Brambles are enmeshed overhead to form protective mats and barricades, whilst his body dissolves like a handful of salt in the ocean. A partial, corrupt syntax is digested; his mute, contingent life dissipates within in deep-brown loam. On the surface, soil subtly moves in response to the profound transformation beneath, and an unnoticed trickle of dirt flows from the site of metamorphosis and onto the road. A delicate thread of life is preserved in a patch of living ground.
It is autumn, and the Master of the Revels stokes a fire within the grounds of the castle. He is a short, thin man, with a constantly anxious visage, his brow knotted and his mouth sincere, a burdened appearance only amplified by a heavy coat of office. Unused to physical labour, the Master of the Revels struggles with large windfall branches from around the grounds, stoking the fire which constantly threatens to be extinguished by the wind.
The new Fool: was that decision a mistake? He had taken to walking the palace in his civilian clothes, exercising his rank and status, and would only wear correct costumes under the extreme provocation of unquestionable duty. No one welcomes a surly fool, and the incumbent's disinclination to merriment seemed to uniquely disqualify him from his role.
A burst of laughter broke over the grounds and, as if pursued, the Master of Revels cast his eyes back over his shoulder to the palace, where the feast was at its height. The young fool, whose well-defined torso and glorious arse had made his selection inevitable, had been left contentedly singing and juggling within the great hall.
The Master of Revels forced open lid of the old warped chest which he had dragged, with considerable exertion, from the jester's chamber. From the chest, he grabbed a handful of clothes and a pair of boots, and threw them onto the fire, where they smouldered rather inconclusively. He poked at the clothes his staff of office until they began to catch the flames. After again checking over his shoulder, the Master of Revels grabbed a second handful, and these the flames devoured more quickly. Now reasonably certain of the fire's capacity for consumption, he quickly emptied the remaining contents of the chest onto the large pile of brightly burning branches. Within half an hour, no traces of the clothes remained.
With no shoes other than his thin cloth boots, and no clothes, rank, nor status, beyond his one motley coat, the jester could now do nothing other than stay at the castle to entertain the king.
Do not eat bread or meat in hell; do not drink wine in hell; do not accept a seat or bed. Do not have intercourse in hell. Conduct yourself with dignity, and you will leave.
Nergal passed anxiously through the first gate of hell; fearfully through the second; weeping through the third; and wailing through the fourth. Through the fifth gate he passed with his heart reverberating in his rib cage; through the sixth with a leaden stomach, twisted in anticipation. By the seventh he knelt on all fours, and walked like the beasts of the field; and at the eighth he squirmed like a snake on his belly. By the ninth, Nergal was ashamed of his histrionic passage, and rose to his feet and passed through the gate with dignity and poise.
Within hell, he smelt bread baking in a distant room: the sharp sour odour yeast; the allure of gently browning dough; the appetising overtones of vanilla. Entranced by the distant smells, more vital even than those from his own kingdom, Nergal halted his progress towards the queen's court. But Ereshkigal herself had walked to the gates, and welcome him there, during his indecision. Nergal forgot the distant bakery, and conducted himself with dignity.
Before dawn, a young woman in an understated black dress, black calf length boots, and black stockings cross-gartered in yellow, walks up a steep downland hill. Mist hangs low, and the dawn chorus is beginning rouse itself from sleep. From tessellating territories, blackbirds preen their funerial dress with jarringly youthful vigour. The woman breathes deeply from the exertion of the climb and rolls a cigarette, the pouch of tobacco hanging from her mouth as she busies her hands with the paper and filter.
Along a distant corridor, Nergal smelt large barrels of wine, and vats of beer, hoarded in some distant cellar. The smell of oak, of vinegar, and ripe fruit reminded him of earlier days picking mushrooms in woodland.
The path suddenly split, and Nergal found himself facing a dilemma: to follow those invigorating smells of wine and ale, down narrow, shallow steps into the distant cellar, or to continue his journey with Ereshkigal to her court. Undecided, he stopped at the fork, and Ereskhigal paused alongside, saying nothing but watching him intently; awaiting his decision. Nergal conducted himself with dignity, and continued to walk to Ereshkigal's throne room. She smiled.
Reaching the summit of the hill, at the edge of the wood, after carefully brushing away debris the young woman sat on an old log which faced the trees, and waited for the silence to engulf her. For a few moments, she simply concentrated on regaining her breath. Relaxed, she lit her cigarette. The young woman continued to survey the inner gloom of the forest. As she finished her shift, chaos had been erupting at A&E. In the time it took for the doors to her ward neurosurgery ward to ponderously open, four ambulances had raced past, flashing blue but silent, and had pulled up behind each other at casualty, twenty meters beyond the main hospital entrance. As she headed across the access road to the car park, paramedics were unloading the casualties, perhaps of a road traffic accident, onto stretchers.
Celebrations at the castle had begun to wane. As the sun rose, guests began to depart. Sleepless, an Earl and two companions decided to accept the king's permission to allow hunting within the deer park for the duration of the festival. The Master of Revels, who had returned to the feast, could not find the young fool amongst the celebrants. A drunk bishop told him that the fool had departed an hour or so earlier, in good spirit.
Upon meeting Nergal, Ereshkigal offered him a seat, but he politely declined he offer. She understood.
The earl saw movement at the edge of the forest. He had stopped near the edge of the woodland, to resolve the distant shape through the mist. One of his companions, one of the nation's top cavalrymen, a true knight and attentive companion, had halted immediately alongside. The other of the party, a renowned astronomer, philosopher, and mathematician was, however, an inexperienced hunter, and failed to notice his companions' sudden reticence. Obliviously, he continued to wander through the woodland, prattling on the shape and speed of the orbits of the planets, until the earl was forced to call out sharply, and quieten him.
In time, what the earl had first taken to be a badger or a fox, revealed itself to be a young woman climbing the steep grassy bank. There was something unnerving and diabolical in her appearance, which was more than a little unworldly. In her mouth the strange creature held some kind of pouch, and her fingers were constantly twitching and writhing.
The earl's senses had been weakened by wine and insomnia. The sinister woman rose from the earth, projected by demons from her cowslip and bryony grave. Her head rose first from the soil, then her body, and finally her legs and feet, as the ground spat her forth in some end-time ultimatum. For stony minutes, the three huntsmen anxiously watched the demon from the seclusion of the forest edge. She stopped on the outskirts of the forest, adjacent to their hiding place, and held a lighted brimstone cinder in her mouth.
Ereshkigal disrobed in a private chamber and took a bath. Nergal caught sight of her body, but he did not give in to temptation. He waited for Ereshkigal to finish her bath, and to dress, and to return to her throne.
As she walked towards the dais, Nergal saw in her attire, in her conduct, and in her stately deportment, a fierce and effortless dignity, and a concentration of earthly power despite her domain, which quickly overcame him and, discarded to lust, he grabbed Ereshkigal by the hand, and led her to her bed chamber, where they lay with each other in passionate embrace, and burnt into ashes his contract with the gods.
Seeing no alternative available to him, the walker accepts the driver's insistent offer, and steps into his idle blue car.
The Master of Revels saw through the darkness a deep fiery-red light, glowing behind the glassless window of a small store-house on the edge of the palace grounds. Upon arriving at the small stone building, he stood at its doorway, and found the jester naked, asleep on his side, lying on discarded storage-room rags, inches from a small, intense fire glowing in the grate. An uncompromising wind blew angrily across the estate, whipping up leaves, stretching and creaking buildings, and loosening roofs. Next to the fool's body lay his jester's clothes, neglected in a careless pile.
The Master of the Revels stepped into the store-house, which he discovered made a very poor shelter from the frigid wind. The jester almost embraced the fire, his body half encircling the grate. The Master of Revels crept towards the jester's sleeping form, and lightly placed his hand on his back: it was as cold as stone. Again, carefully so as not to wake him, the Master of the Revels felt the virile radiative heat of the fire as he placed the palm of his hand before the fool's chest. The fool himself continued to sleep, oblivious to his master's presence.
Staring into the forest for slow, contemplative answers, she re-enacted the trauma of her shift. At their worst, degenerative diseases can sap your will to live: they can even challenge your support of the concept of life itself. Hallucinations seem to be contagious: not only can they can convict you of hidden insanity, they can also induce it where once it was absent.
Slowly and unexpectedly, as she worked her way through her shift on the ward, the shadows between the trees took form, and she believed that she saw a sketch of a medieval hunting party, watchful and motionless on the edge of the forest. She stared at the gaps of darkness, and drew shapes more clearly. Three men, on horseback, waiting.
Nergal returned to heaven, having convinced himself that his indiscretion was undetectable, and of no real consequence. He was admitted to the city of the skies, which gave him further hope in his conclusion.
The first god he met, he failed to recognise. He had been gone for a while, but surely not long enough to forget the name of an inhabitant of heaven? And the second god, too, was a stranger. It was the third and the fourth which hammered his amnesia home. And so Nergal wandered throughout heaven, along its streets and highways, through its courts and its busy gathering places, and Nergal recognised no one, his memory burnt away.
But his amnesia did not end at the inhabitants of heaven. Even the roads and heavenly courts were now unknowable to him. Not only could he not recall their shape nor assembly from past memory, he could devise no scheme to lodge them in his mind. They would slip from his memory the moment he turned from their sight. For days Nergal wandered, lost, through heaven, his robes becoming tattered, his speech disordered and uncleaved.
His heavy coat of office lying on the floor, next to the fool's motley coat and three-belled hat, the Master of Revels removed his tunic and underclothes. Carefully he kneeled behind the jester, assaying the shape of his body, so as to duplicate it with his own. The Master of Revels sank to the ground, and carefully laid himself behind the fool, in exact, matching form, guarding the fools body from the diabolical gale. A heaviness overcame him, and he slept.
Things could not continue as they were. Something would snap shortly, or else, more fearfully, she would slowly shrink and decay. The young woman, sitting on the log on the downland hill might continue walking a constant brink for decades, and wither in the constant onslaught of degeneration. She stood, straightened her dress, and walked towards the shapes in the forest.
The earl and the cavalryman tired of inaction. They watched the demon as it stood and begin to walk towards them. Fearful of her touch, they bid their horses walk, and carefully left the forest, so they might meet the strange creature on their own terms, and at a place and time of their choosing. Emerging from the camouflage of the trees, gaining in both confidence and fear, the earl begin to trot as he approaches the woman, and then quickly broke into a cantor.
As she approaches the edge of the forest, the young woman suddenly hears a vast unencompassable rushing sound; a confusion of sensation embodied as lines and as streaks of colour, at the corners and at the centre of her vision; a constant insatiable wind; and a stabbing pain in her body as if she were transparent to some flowing, rushing substance.
As suddenly as it began, it ends. All is calm and silent, and the forest is only a dark patch of woodland on the edge of a seaside town.
Nine hundred years earlier, an earl and a cavalryman charge down the same hillside, and the strange young woman disappears, in a moment, into the morning mist. A mathematician trots inexpertly behind.
"Namtar: you will return to heaven for a third time. Fetch me Nergal. He will return willingly."
On an island in the pacific, hunters armed with spears descend from the mountainous tropical forest to a beach, expecting to find a swimmer, waiting for their arrival. Her coming, dressed in red, was foretold to them by analysis of the froth on the ocean.
But when they finally reach the shore, they find only a finch, pecking at the sand, in a shallow depression in the ground.
Words and earth are flowing, ignorant of the other's passage.