DAVID CALCUTT
The Map of Marvels
EXTRAIT
There was a road stretching out before him, running in a straight line across the desert. It was made of blocks of reddish stone, cracked and broken and buckled with heat and age. The road ran as far as he could see, narrowing in the distance, and then seeming to melt and dissolve in the shimmer of liquid, molten light. It could have been laid a thousand years ago.
There was a movement close by. He turned. Sherazhad stood beside him. She too was looking down the road. "What is this place?” she said.
“A desert.”
Sindbad was standing just behind her, grinning with the ferocity of the sun upon his face.
“What desert?” said Sherazhad. “And how did we get here?”
“Through the map.”
They all turned at the sound of Trismagistus’ voice. He was standing to the other side of the Connor, a little way from the road. His bald head shone in the strong light. He spoke again. “As I said we would.” He took He took a step closer to Connor. “Do you still have it?”
Connor thought about the last time he had seen the map. It was when they were looking at it on the floor of the hut in the whale’s belly. Just before the first jolt. He shook his head.
“No.”
“Pity. But it doesn’t really matter. “This will road I will lead us there.”
“Where?” Sindbad too was looking down the road, and grinning with the ferocity of the sun upon his face. “It seems to go on forever.”
“But it doesn’t,” said Trismagistus. “It ends at the city of Ophir.”
“And from there we can find the Tower,” said Sindbad.
“That’s the plan,” said Trismagistus.
“You have a plan?” said Sherazhad.
Trismagistus smiled.
“Something does,” he said.
Connor looked at him. The intense desert light was making his eyes swim and Trismagistus’ face seemed to blur, go in and out focus. But his words had been clear enough. A plan. Something has a plan. Something making everything happen. But what? And for what reason? He shook his head. It was no good even trying to think about that now. He wanted to be out of this heat.
“Which way do we go?” he said.
“There is only one way,” said Trismagistus. “Look behind you.”
Connor turned. The others turned. Behind them, and on either side of the road, nothing but the desert scrubland stretching away into the distance. The road began where their feet stood. They all turned back and looked down the long road, the way they had to go. The heat bounced off it in burning waves. The sky above it an relentless, unforgiving blue.
“We’re going to die in this heat,” said Sherazhad.
“My throat’s dry already,” said Sindbad.
Suddenly Connor realised that he was holding the bottle in his hand. The clay bottle he had filled with water. He held it up. “There’s water here,” he said.
They passed the bottle round and drank a little from it each in turn. It still had that foul, stale taste, but something about the dryness of their heat, and of their throats, made it a little sweeter. When they’d finished, Connor replaced the stopper.
“We have water, and we have food,” said Trismagistus.
“Food?” said Sherazhad.
“The strips of dried meat I gave you,” he said.
Sherazhad pulled a face. She took one of the blackened strips from a pocket in her trousers and looked at it. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I’d have to be starving to try and eat one of these.”
“You may be yet,” said Trismagistus. “Who knows how far the city is from here?”
“You mean you don’t?” said Sindbad.
“Why should I?” said Trismagistus. “I’ve never travelled this road before.” He put his hands to the back of his cloak and lifted a ragged hood that hung there and pulled it over his head. “We’d better be going,” he said, and set off ahead of them along the road.
Sindbad untied his sash and let his sword drop onto the road, then tied the sash over his head for protection against the sun. He picked up the sword and kept it in his hand.
“My turban would have been better,” he said. “But this will have to do.”
Sherazhad had also pulled her headscarf over her head. Then she looked at Connor, thought for a moment, and took her knife out of the sash at her waist and untied the sash and held it out to Connor.
“Thanks,” he said.
He reached out and took it and tied the sash over his head.
“Ready?” said Sindbad.
He nodded and looked down the road. Trismagistus seemed already a long way ahead of them, a sketchy, scratchmark figure who might at any moment fade and vanish into the immensity of light.
He set off, and the others with him, along the road through the desert.
They moved through an endless expanse of heat and glare, of hazed and shivered tremblings of light. About them, the desert land of sand and scrub, small bushes of thorn and flowers of flame. Their feet dragged under the sun’s weight, and the sky pressed its heat down upon their heads. Every now and then they stopped, and drank from the bottle, just a little, to dampen their cracked lips, ease the parched dryness of their throats. They had to make it last. They didn’t know when or if they would come upon fresh water. And each time they stopped the landscape looked the same, as if they had travelled no distance. They did not know how long they had been walking. They had lost all sense of time. So they moved on through the earth’s furnace.
Connor and Sherazhad were walking side by side. Sindbad was a little way behind them. Trismagistus was some way ahead.
“How long do you think we’ve been going?” said Connor. He kept his head down, watching his feet upon the road. He couldn’t stand the pain of the light in his eyes when he raised them.
“I don’t know,” said Sherazhad. “It seems like hours, but I can’t tell.”
Connor was silent for a while, then he spoke again.
“Do you remember being on the ship?”
“Of course I do,” said Sherazhad.
“When was it?” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“When we were there? How long ago?”
For a while Sherazhad said nothing. When she spoke there was an edge of fear in her voice.
“I don’t know that either.”
“Neither do I,” said Connor.
He’d been thinking about this for a while now. Trying to put the sequence of events in order, all that had happened since he’d fallen through the map onto the ship. To measure them against each other, work out some sense of time, its length and passage. But he couldn’t. It was like trying to measure the things that happen in a dream. In a dream, things appeared to happen in an instant and to go on forever at the same time. It was like that here. Except this wasn’t a dream. In a dream there’s a part of you that knows you’re dreaming. Here every part of him knew he was awake.
He wanted to say something of that to Sherazhad. And he was trying to find the words to start saying them, when she spoke.
“I’ll tell you what I do remember.”
“What?”
“The taste of the dried fruit. Figs and dates. On board the ship. Do you remember that?”
He did. He closed his eyes, thinking about it. He could almost taste the rich sweetness of the fruit, their sweetness in his mouth. He opened his eyes.
Sherazhad was looking at him. They smiled at each other.
“Hungry?” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
“We could eat some of that dried meat,” she said.
“Not that hungry,” he said.
They smiled again. Then Sherazhad looked past him, and the smile left her face, and she said, “What’s that?” She’d stopped walking and was pointing away to the left of the road. “There,” she said. “Look.”
Connor turned and looked.
At first thought he thought it was just the heat making the air shimmer above the desert. Four or five trembling columns of light some distance from the road’s edge. But as he gazed at them they seemed to begin to take on a more solid form. Or it as if they wanted to take on solid form, and could only do so as long as he looked at them. And he realised that was all he wanted to do, to keep on looking at them. Entranced he watched as delicate spirals of colour appeared and began to coil and wind about those shivering, translucent beings. And at the same time, as if far off, he heard a high, wild singing, as if the voice of light itself.
“They’re beautiful,” said Sherazhad. “Do you see them?”
“Yes,” he said. “I see them. And they are beautiful.”
“They’re calling. They want us to go to them.”
And even as she spoke both he and she were stepping off the road and beginning to walk dreamlike across the sand towards them. The spirals of colour swirled faster, the singing grew clearer, sharper, the figures held out their arms towards them.
“No! Stop! Don’t look!”
Sindbad’s voice stabbed through the trance, and Connor felt a strong hand grip his shoulder, pulling him back. He tried to tear himself free of the grip, to run towards those figures waiting for him, but Sindbad’s fingers bit deeper into his shoulder so that he cried out in anger, and in pain, and once more that hard, rough voice shouted loud in his ears.
“Look away!”
And he was dragged stumbling backwards, and in that instant the song became a savage snarl of rage, and he caught a glimpse of withered, shrivelled faces glaring at him out of a bloody mist, that melted, as the cries melted, into the clear desert light.
He stood on the road again. Sindbad was beside him. Sherazhad was on his other side.
“What were they?” said Connor.
“Djinn,” said Sindbad. “An evil kind. They eat human souls.”
“But they were so beautiful,” said Sherazhad. “And their singing.”
“So they would appear to you,” said Sindbad, “until they had you caught in their
embrace. Then you would have seen and heard them differently.”
Connor saw again those withered faces, heard those savage snarls. Despite the heat he shivered.
“You saw something of that,” said Sindbad. Connor nodded. “Those faces would have been the last thing you saw, those voices the last thing you heard, before they tore your spirits from you and devoured them like jackals.”
“What about our bodies?” said Sherazhad.
“They would have becomes as theirs are. Things of no substance, desert wanderers, eternally hungry for the souls of others.”
Connor gazed out across the desert, and its vast spaces were no longer empty to his eyes. It was an invisible world, filled with strange figures, of which he had glimpses, and which had almost claimed him for its own.
He turned to Sherazhad. She too looked troubled. They walked on along the road in silence.
***
At last they came to water.
The desert on either side of the road had been rising steadily, to form a line of rocky bluffs of red sandstone, scarred and cracked by the scourings of sun and wind. Now they came to a place where there was a clump of thorny bushes growing in the shade of the rock, and a group of stunted palm trees. Beneath the trees was a small waterhole. They left the road and made their way to the trees and knelt by the waterhole, scooping up the fresh-tasting water into their mouths.
Connor emptied out what remained of the stale water in the bottle and re-filled it from the hole. As he was doing this, Sherazhad said, “Look!”
He looked up. She was pointing to one of the palm trees. Hanging down from its trunk were a number of long stalks, and at the end of each stalk a large cluster of oval-shaped, reddish-brown fruits. The other trees were hung with the same fruits.
“Dates,” she said. She stood and reached up and plucked one and bit into the soft, sweet flesh, pulling it with her teeth from around the stone at its centre, then sucking at the stone until it was clean. She dropped the stone among the rocks and grinned at Connor.
“Even better than those on the ship,” she said.
She plucked another date and threw it to Connor. He was holding the bottle with one hand and he caught the date with the other, then bit into it, as Sherazhad had done. Its sweetness made his teeth tingle.
“You’re right,” he said. He took another bite. “And definitely better than those strips of dried meat.”
“We may need them yet.”
Trismagistus was crouched over the waterhole, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Sindbad shook his head and smiled and stood. He picked a date from a tree beside him. “We may,” said Sindbad. “But not tonight at least.”
And as he bit into the fruit he closed his eyes with pleasure.
Then they all plucked more dates from the tree, eating as they picked them until they were full. It wasn’t until he started eating that Connor realised just how hungry he’d been. When they’d had enough they sat back against the trees with their stomachs full though their bodies ached with the weariness of their travels.
The sun was beginning to go down when they arrived there. The sky deepening its blue, a single pale star low on the horizon, the light milder upon the desert stillness. For a while none of them spoke. Sindbad sat with his head back, eyes gazing upwards towards the broad, fronded leaves of the palm trees. Sherazhad’s eyes were closed. Trismagistus sat with his head bowed forward, hands resting on his knees. Connor’s mind was empty of everything except for that same dull ache that filled his entire body.
After a while, Sindbad looked down and spoke.
“It’s lucky we found this place before the sun went down. We’d have frozen in the desert at night. Sleeping against the rocks will give us some warmth.”
“What about tomorrow?” said Sherazhad. “How long will it take to reach the city?”
She was looking towards Trismagistus. He spoke from beneath his hood. “I don’t know.”
“You said you knew it.”
“I do.”
“You’ve been there.”
“Yes.”
“Then why don’t you know where it is?”
Trismagistus raised his hands to his hood and drew it back a little from his face and looked up at Sherazhad, at all of them. His eyes glittered. The thin, dry voice seemed to come from lips that did not move.
“Because when I was there it was not in this world.”
They all three sat up. It was Sindbad who spoke. “Where was it?”
“The world I came from.”
“What world is that?” said Sherazhad. “Your world? What’s it like there? Tell us.”
Connor could tell from the sound of her voice she didn’t believe what Trismagistus was telling them. But if Trismagistus was aware of that, he showed no sign. He leaned forward a little, and drew his hood further back from his face.
“How can I describe it to you?” he said. “It’s been so long since I left there I hardly remember it myself. It’s like a dream to me, half remembered on waking. Fading. An old tale from another age. So it is with your own worlds. Each one unimaginable and strange. This is the only world we have now. The world we share. The only world known to us.” He leaned further forward, his face close to theirs, and his voice was a whisper, and each word as sharp and clear as a blade. “And this world too, and all that happens in it, all that is happening now, is a story, an old tale. And we are part of its telling.”
Those words cut deep. If they were blades, then they were blades of ice. Suddenly he wanted to see his home again, to see his sister, his mother and father, his friends. He closed his eyes and tried to see them, tried to picture his house, the rooms in his house, himself in those rooms, living his life, his ordinary life. He tried to fix it in his mind, to make it real. But it kept shifting, drifting, smoke in a mirror, and the more he tried to recall it, the further it floated away from him. A dream half-remembered. An old tale. He wanted to cry out. No. No! But the words wouldn’t come, his voice made no sound. It was Sherazhad who spoke, and broke the silence.
“What you just said,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense.”
She was staring fiercely at Trismagistus. He smiled at her. “Tell me something you’ve come across here that does,” he said. And he pulled his hood across his head and leaned back against the tree.
The sun had almost set now and they felt in the air the first cold of the desert night. Beyond their shelter beneath the bluff, the desert itself was draining of colour, a vast shadowland lit by many stars. While there was light remaining they broke branches from the bushes and gathered them into a pile and the thorns from those bushes they snapped off and placed at the centre of the pile for tinder. This was all on Sindbad’s instruction. Then he took Sherazhad’s knife and struck it against a stone above the tinder so that the sparks flew among the thorns, and they began to glow, and he bowed his head and blew gently on the glowing thorns until they crackled and sparked themselves. Plumes of tangy smoke rose upward and small flames flickered and ran the length of the cut branches. So they had a fire for warmth and companionship in the dark.
They sat around the fire, with heat of the flames on their faces, their hands, letting that heat fold itself into their bodies, so the aching in their limbs became a delicious tiredness, and one by one they eased themselves down beside the rocks or beneath a tree, and the stillness and the silence of the desert night with all its stars lay upon them.
Connor lay on his back looking up at those stars through the fringed leaves of the palm trees and wondered if they were the same as those that shone in the sky in his world. Was this world in a different universe, with its own stars, its own planets? Or was his own world at this moment circling one of those distant stars? He lifted his arm and stretched out his fingers, his hand pressed flat against the dark’s fragile skin. Then he slowly closed his fingers, as if he might pluck from the sky his own world, as he had plucked the dates from the tree, shut his hand upon it, hold it safe in his palm. He lowered his arm and held his fist before his face. Then he opened it. It was empty. He turned over on his side and sometime after this he fell asleep.