The Inner Landscape, page 5
They both knew this by bitter experience, for in the far-off days they had, along with other half-men, made the mistake of whispering to one another, not realising that the merest breath was sucked into the great flues and chimneys and so down to the central areas where they turned and twisted, threading their way to where the Lamb sat upright, its ears and nostrils pricking with sentience.
Masters in the art of deaf and dumb language and also of lip-reading, they chose the latter, for the dangling position of the Goat’s white cuffs obscured the fingers. So, staring one another in the face, they mouthed their words in deathly silence.
“He knows ... we ... are ... here ... Hyena ... dear.”
“He .... can . .,. smell ... us ... by ... now ...”
“And . .. the ... Boy ..
“Of ... course.... Of ... course. ... My ... stomach’s ...turning .. .. over .
“I . . . will . . . go .. . first ... with ... the ... Boy ... and .. . prepare ... his ... supper . .. and . .. his ... bed.”
“You . . . will ... not . .. you ... homhead. ...
Leave . . . him ... to ... me ... or ... I ... will ... crush . . . you.”
“Then ... I ... will ... go ... alone ...”
“Of ... course . .. you ... dust ... trap ...”
“He . . . must . . . be . .. washed . . . tonight, and ... fed . .. and . . . given ... water. That is . . . for you . .. to do . . . since . . . you . .. insist. I . . . will . . . acquaint . .. our Master. ... Oh ... my green . . . loins. . . . My . . . loins. . . . My terrified . . . loins ...”
They turned and withdrew from one another, their lips ceasing to move, but as they ended their conversation they brought their lips together and in his sanctum the White Lamb heard the sound of the cessation, a sound resembling that of a cobweb crumbling to the floor or the step of a mouse on moss.
So the Hyena went on alone, carrying the Boy before him in his hands, until he came to the foot of a prodigious shaft more like an abyss than anything consciously constructed. And here, on the edge of this great well of darkness, he knelt down and clasping his horrid hands together he whispered:
“White Lord of Midnight, hail!”
The five words fell almost palpably down the throat of the herb-less, lifeless shaft and, echoing their way nether-wards, came at last into the orbit of the Lamb’s reception.
“It is Hyena, my Lord, Hyena whom you rescued from the upper void. Hyena, who came to you, to love you and serve your purposes. Hail.”
Then came a voice from the abysmal darkness. It was like a little bell tinkling, or the sound of naked innocence, or the crowing of a babe ... or the bleating of a Lamb. “You have somebody with you, I believe?”
The little voice trilled out of the darkness; it had no need to be raised. Like a needle piercing its way through rotten fabric, so this sweet sound penetrated to the furthermost recesses of the Underground Kingdom. It reached, trill echoing trill, into the dungeons away to the west, where among the twisted girders of red rust the silent floors were noduled with a sea of purple mushrooms, dead as the ground they had once risen from. It needed but the stamp of a foot to bring them down in a great death of colourless dust—no foot, no gust of air, nothing had passed that way for a hundred years.
It penetrated in every direction, this voice of the Lamb’s . . . and now it spoke again.
“I am waiting for your answer . . . and for you.”
Then with a thin sigh like the sound of a scythe, “What have you brought back from out of the vile sunlight? What have you got for your Lord? I am still waiting.” “We have a Boy.”
“A Boy?”
“A Boy—touchless.”
There was a long silence during which Hyena thought he could hear something which he had never heard before, a kind of far palpation, a remote throbbing.
But the voice of the Lamb was as clear and sweet and fresh as a water-chute and quite emotionless.
“Where is the Goat?”
“The Goat,” said Hyena, “has done everything to hinder me. Shall I come down, my Lord?”
“I think that what I said was, ‘Where is the Goat?’ I am not interested in whether or not he hinders you or you hinder him. What interests me at the moment is his whereabouts. Wait! Do I hear him in the Southern Gallery?” “Yes, Master,” said the Hyena. He thrust his head and shoulders so far over the edge of the abyss that it would seem dangerous to anyone unacquainted with his miraculous head for heights and his general agility in dark and precipitous places.
“Yes, Master. The Goat is descending by the iron staircase. He has gone to prepare the Boy his bread and water. The hairless thing has fainted. You would not wish to see him, my White Lord, until he has been washed, fed and rested. Nor do you want to see the Goat, that stupid crack-head. I will not allow him to irk you.”
“You are strangely kind today,” came the sweet voice from the deeps. “So I am sure you will do what I tell you; for if you do otherwise I shall have your black mane burned away. So come at once with your exhausted friend and I will size him up. I can smell him already and I must say he is like a breath of fresh air in the place. Are you on your way? I don’t hear anything.” The Lamb had bared Ills pearly teeth.
“I am on my way . . . Master ... on my way . . cried the Hyena, who was shaking with fear, for the Lamb’s voice was like a knife in a velvet sheath. “I will bring him to you now to be yours for ever,” and Hyena, his legs and arms still trembling in spite of all their strength, began to lower himself and the Boy over the edge of the pit where a chain shone dimly in the moonlight.
In order to have both hands free for swarming down the iron chain, Hyena had slung the Boy over his shoulder, where he moaned pitifully.
But Hyena cared nothing about this, for he had recognised a note of a different blend in the Lamb’s voice. He still spoke as gently, as horribly gently as before, but there was a difference now. What it was exactly that gave Hyena the impression that the voice had altered it is impossible to say, for Hyena could only feel the change, and the feel of it was that of hidden fervour.
Indeed, what cause there was! Any creature of lesser calibre than the Lamb would by now have been unable to control the horrid thrill of his excitement.
For a decade or more had passed since the last visitor sat down at table with him—sat down and saw the veiled eyes of the Lamb, and knew even as he stared at his host that his soul was being sucked out of him. He had died, like the rest, the brain running away too sharply from the body or the body leaping like a frog in search of the brain, so that they broke apart and, like the machinery of the Mines, they died away into silence and emptiness of death.
What it was that kept the last two underlings alive even the Lamb did not know. Something in their natures or in their organs gave the Goat and the Hyena some sort of physical immunity—something, perhaps, to do with their general coarseness of soul and fibre. They had outlived a hundred powerful beasts whose metamorphoses had in time destroyed them from within. The Lion, only an age ago, had collapsed in a mockery of power, bending his great head as he did so, the tears welling from the amber eyes to thread their way down tracts of golden cheekbone. It was a great and terrible fall: yet it was merciful, for under the macabre aegis of the dazzling Lamb the one-tune King of beasts was brought to degradation, and there is nothing more foul than the draining of the heart’s blood, drop by drop, from the great golden cat.
Collapsing with a roar, it had, so it seemed, dragged down the night, as though it were a curtain, and when the candles had been lit again there was nothing there but a cloak and a breastplate and a dagger bright with stars and, floating away into the unutterable darkness of the Western Vaults, the mane of the great half-beast, like an aura.
And there had been the Man, delicate and nimble, across whose face the Lamb had drawn his finger, so that he knew, in his blindness, by touch and a quivering in the air that he was pure gazelle. But he had died a century after, at the exquisite height of a bound, his great eyes losing lustre as he fell. . . .
And there had been the Mantis-man, the Pig-man and the Dogs; the Crocodile, the Raven and that inordinate Fish that sang like a linnet. But they had all died at one stage or another in their transmutation for lack of some ingredient, some necessity for survival, which for some obscure reason Hyena and the Goat possessed.
It was a source of chagrin to the Lamb that of all the diverse creatures to have passed through his tiny, snow-white hands, creatures of all shapes, sizes and intellects, he should find himself left at last with a couple of near-idiots —the cowardly and bullying Hyena and the sycophantic Goat. There was a time when his secret Vault with its rich carpets, golden candlesticks, incense burning in beakers of jade and its crimson awnings swaying a little from the distant updraught of the air-shafts—there was a time when this sanctum had been filled with his hierophants who, awestruck at the sight of such a place, peered over one another’s shoulders (shoulders of fur, shoulders of bristle, shoulders of raw hide, shoulders of scale and feather) at their lord, while he, the Lamb, the creator, as it were, of a new kingdom, a new species, sat on his high-backed throne, the dull blue membrane covering his eyes, his breast sumptuous with soft and peerless curls, his hands folded, his faintly tinctured lips the most delicate of mauves, and on his head, on rare occasions, a crown of delicate bones exquisitely interwoven, bleached to a whiteness that rivalled the very wool that was his raiment.
This crown was constructed from the thin bones of a stoat and indeed it seemed that something of the stoat’s mercurial and terrible vitality had remained in the marrow of the filigree structure, for when the Lamb, out of the diabolical hell of its heart, discovered his own heinous power to hold a victim rooted to the ground so that the blood within the creature yearned for annihilation at the hands of the torturer, the heart pounding against its will, then was it like the swaying stoat with its upright carriage and its kiss of death upon the jugular.
And indeed the Goat had seen it in the Lamb; and the Hyena also. That mesmeric swaying, that upright back. All but the kiss of death. All but the jugular. For the White Lamb was not interested in corpses (though they filled the darkness with their bones), but only in playthings.
And all he had left was the Hyena and the Goat. Yet he still held court. He was still the Lord of the Mines, though it was a great length of time since he had worn the crown, for he had given up hope of new victims.
Year after year, decade after decade, in this subterranean world of silence and of death, nothing had stirred, nothing had moved, not even the dust; nothing but their voices from time to time, when the Goat or Hyena reported at close of day, recounting to the Lamb the tale of each day’s search. Search: fruitless search! That was the burden of their lives. That was their purpose. To find another human, for the Lamb itched for his talents to burgeon once again. For he was like a pianist manacled, the keyboard before him. Or a famished gourmet unable to reach, but able to. see a table spread with delicacies.
But all this was over and the Lamb, though he made no sign, and though his voice was as smooth and even as oil on water, was consumed with an exquisite apprehension, quite terrible in its intensity.
The Lamb could hear two noises, one of them proceeding from the gigantic funnel to the north and the other, a good mile further to the east, much fainter but perfectly clear ... a kind of obsequious shuffling.
The other noise was altogether more imminent, and was, of course, proceeding from the nearby shaft where Hyena lowered himself link by link through the darkness with the Boy slung over his hirsute shoulders. As he descended, three sounds preceded him: the grinding and straining of the iron links, a slow panting in the beast’s capacious chest, and the munching of small bones.
The Lamb, in his sanctum, alone save for the loudening sound of his henchmen, sat very upright. Although his eyes were veiled and sightless, yet his entire face had something about it that was watchful. The head was not cocked upon one side; the ears were not pricked; there was no quivering to be seen; no tension; yet never was a creature as alert, as evil, as predatory. Cold horror was returning to the sanctum: the throbbing horror of the will. For the scent in the nostrils of the Lamb had by now become more specific. The field of odour had narrowed and it was no longer a matter of conjecture as to what it was that the Lamb would soon be touching with his soft white hand. He would be touching nothing less than flesh entirely human.
He could not, as yet, determine such niceties as the age of the captive, for he was shrouded in the fumes of iron that spread from the long chain, and the smell of the earth through which the well-head had been bored, not to speak of the indescribable effluvia of the Hyena—and a hundred other emanations.
But with every yard of descent these varying odours detached themselves one from another and there came the moment when, with absolute surety, the Lamb knew that there was a Boy in the shaft.
A Boy in the shaft. A Boy from the Other Region . . . approaching . . . descending. . . . This in itself was enough to cause the very girders of the Mines to coil and spill red rust like sand. It was enough to start excited echoes— echoes unparented. Echoes that cried like demons: echoes at large like ears among the shadows: echoes of consternation: echoes delirious: echoes barbaric: echoes of exultation.
For the world had forsaken the Mines, and time had forgotten them: yet here was the world again: the globe in microcosm. A human ... a Boy . . . something to break ... or to batter down, as though it were clay . . . and then to build again.
Meanwhile, as the moments passed, and the Hyena and the Boy drew nearer and nearer to the sumptuous Vault below them where the Lamb sat immobile as a marble carving save only for the flickering of his dilated nostrils, the Goat, away to the west, had reached the wide and empty floor of the Mines, and was shuffling along in that horrible sideways gait of his, the left shoulder always in advance of the rest of his body. And as he made his furtive way he muttered to himself, for he was full of grievance. What right had Hyena to have all the credit? Why should Hyena make the presentation? It had been he, the Goat, who had found the human. It was bitterly unfair: a hotness of anger burned like a live coal beneath his ribs. The culls of his jacket shook and Ills tombstone teeth were displayed in what could be taken either for a grin or a threat.
In fact it was a sign of frustration and hatred, a rankling hatred, for this was a moment never again to be repeated, a moment of such dramatic importance to the three of them that there should have been no question of rivalry for favour.
Could they not have approached their Emperor, the Lamb, together? Could they not have held the prisoner, one on either side, and made their bow together, and offered him together? Oh, it was most unjust and the Goat beat his hands together at his sides, and a nasty sweat poured down his long face, on the damp bristles through which his yellow eyes shone pale coins.
So strongly did he feel all this that he now began unconsciously to think of the Boy almost as a brother in distress: someone who because of his hatred for Hyena (and this had been obvious from the first moment) had become, automatically and by pure retaliation, an ally.
But there was nothing he could do, in his pent-up condition, save make his way towards the Vault some short way from which in his own dank quarters he would—as a gesture, or a slap in Hyena’s face—he would prepare his own bed for the Boy and stave his hunger and thirst with water and sour bread.
It was obvious that the Boy’s need for sleep and sustenance outweighed any other factor, for what possible advantage could there be to the Lamb to see the thing he had been waiting for, for so many years, in a state of collapse?
He would wish for an alert and sentient prey, and it was the Goat's plan to put this point to the Lamb himself.
It was therefore a matter of great moment that the Goat should make all speed to the sumptuous sanctum of the Lamb, and he began to run as he had never run before.
On every side of him, above him and sometimes below him, the derelict remains of non structures spread out their wild and subterranean arms. Brandished in giant loops, coiling in twisted stairways that led to nowhere, these relics of another age unfurled their iron fantasies as Goat sped by, covering the ground with quite unnatural pace.
It was very dark, but he knew this track of old and never by so much as a touch did he disturb a fragment of the litter that lay scattered on the wide floor. He ^new it as an Indian knows the secret track through the woods, and like the Indian he was ignorant of the great fastness that lay on either side.
There came the time when the ground descended in a slow slope and the Goat, still running edgeways on as though all hell was after him, came to the outskirts of that central dereliction where in his Vault the White Lamb sat and waited.
Even the formidable muscles of Hyena were tested by such a climb but he was now no more than a dozen feet from the subterranean floor, where every sound was amplified and echoes shuffled from wall to wall.
The Boy was no longer in a faint: his head had cleared but his hunger was keener than ever and his limbs felt like water.
Once or twice he had raised himself a little from the shoulders of the half-beast but had fallen back again for lack of strength, although the mane upon which he fell was, for all the oiling that Hyena gave it, as coarse and thick as tare-grass.
Directly he landed, Hyena turned from the swinging chain and fixed his eyes upon the outer wall of the Vault. Had he gazed up the throat of the ancient mine-shaft he would have seen—for his eyes were as keen as an eagle’s —a pin-prick in the darkness, the colour of blood. It was all that could be seen of the sunset, that grain of crimson. But Hyena was not interested in staring up at crimson pin-heads, but in the fact that he was now within a hundred feet of the Lamb.
He knew that even his breathing was overheard by his inscrutable Lord, and he was about to take his first step forward when there was a sudden trampling to his left and a dusty creature in a black coat slewed itself into the picture and only drew up when it was within a yard of its irritable colleague. For it was, of course, the Goat, the dusty-headed Goat who had, to Hyena’s amazement, a grin upon his face, a real grin and no mere show of teeth. It was not long before he knew the reason, and had it not been that every sound that was made was loud in the Lamb’s ear, there is no doubt the Goat would have been savaged mercilessly, if not killed, by the merciless Hyena.
