Beasts John Crowley

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rose again to go.
"Wait," he said. "They won't mind if I stay?"
"If you don't do anything."
"Tell me. That one up on the hill. What's his function?"
"His what?"
"I mean why is he there, and not here? Is he a guard?"
She took a step toward him, suddenly grave. "He's Painter's son," she
said. "His eldest. Painter put him out."
"Put him out?"
"He doesn't understand yet. He keeps trying to come back." She looked
off into the darkness, as though looking into the blank face of an
unresolvable sadness. Meric saw that she couldn't be yet twenty.
"But why?" he said.
She retreated from him. "You stay there," she said, "if you want. Don't
make sudden moves or jump around. Help when you can, they won't mind. Don't
try to understand them."
Just before dawn they began to rise. Meric, stiff and alert after light,
hallucinatory sleep, watched them appear in the blue, bird-loud morning. They
were naked. They gathered silently in the court of the camp, large and
indistinct, the children around them. They all looked east, waiting.
Painter came from his tent then. As though signaled by this, they all
began to move out of the camp, in what appeared to be a kind of precedence.
The girl, naked too, was last but for Painter. Meric's heart was full; his
eyes devoured what they saw. He felt like a man suddenly let out of a small,
dark place to see the wide extent of the world.
Outside the camp, the ground fell away east down to a rushy, marshy
stream. They went down to the stream, children hurrying ahead. Meric rose,
cramped, wondering if he could follow. He did, loitering at what he hoped was
a respectful distance. As they walked down, he studied the strangeness of
their bodies. If they were conscious of his presence, or of their own
nakedness, they didn't show it; in fact they didn't seem naked as naked humans
do, skinned and raw and defenseless, with unbound flesh quivering as they
walked. They seemed clothed in flesh as in armor. A kind of hair, a blond
down, as thick as loincloths between the females' legs, made them seem not so
much hairy as cloudy. Walking made their muscles move visibly beneath the
cloud of hair, their massive thighs and broad backs changing shape subtly as
they took deliberate steps down to the water. In the east, a fan of white rays
shot up suddenly behind downslanting bars of scarlet cirrus, and upward into
the blue darkness overhead. They raised their faces to it.
Meric knew that they considered the sun a god and a personal father. Yet
what he observed had none of the qualities of a ritual of worship. They waded
knee-deep into the water and washed, not ritual ablutions but careful
cleansing. Women washed children and males, and older children washed younger
ones, inspecting, scrubbing, bringing up handfuls of water to rinse one
another. One female calmly scrubbed the girl, who shrank away grimacing from
the force of it; her body was red with cold. Painter stood bent over, hands on
his knees, while the girl and another laved his back and head; he shook his
head to remove the water and wiped his face. A male child splashing near him
attempted to catch him around the neck and Painter threw him roughly aside, so
that the child went under water; Painter caught him up and dunked him again,
rubbing his spluttering face fiercely. Impossible to tell if this was play or
anger. They shouted out now and again, at each other's ministrations or at the
coldness of the water, or perhaps only for shouting; for a spark of sun flamed
on the horizon, and then the sun lifted itself up, and the cries increased.
It was laughter. The sun smiled on them, turning the water running from
their golden bodies to molten silver, and they laughed in his face, a
stupendous fierce orison of laughter.
Meric, estranged on the bank, felt dirty and evanescent, and yet
privileged. He had wondered about the girl, how she could choose to be one of
them when she so obviously couldn't be; how she could deny so much of her own
nature in order to live as they did. He saw now that she had done no such
thing. She had only acceded to their presence, lived as nearly as she could at
their direction and convenience, like a dog trying to please a beloved,
contrary, willful, godlike man, because whatever selfdenial that took,
whatever inconvenience, there was nothing else worth doing. Inconvenience and
estrangement from her own kind were nothing compared to the privilege of
hearing, of sharing, that laughter as elemental as the blackbird's song or the
taste of flesh. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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