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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781409058892
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Vintage 1996
15 17 19 20 18 16 14
Copyright © Salman Rushdie 1975
Salman Rushdie has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain in 1975 by Victor Gollancz
Vintage Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099592716
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also By Salman Rushdie
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
PART ONE: TIMES PRESENT
1 Flapping Eagle
2 Bird-Dog
3 Mr Sispy
4 Phoenix
5 La Femme-Crampon
6 Voyages
7 The Gate
8 Mr Jones
9 Under Calf Mountain
10 Birds
11 Hump
12 The Tremor
13 Dimensions
14 Enemies
15 The Trunk
16 Snap
17 Ascent
18 Magister Anagrammari
19 Fever
20 Jonah
21 Strongdancer
22 Khallit and Mallit
23 The Sea
24 Tunnel
25 Axona’s Champion
26 Out of Order
27 Terror
28 Afterwards
29 Deggle
30 Valhalla
PART TWO: TIMES PAST
31 Stones
32 Blink
33 Outside the Elbaroom
34 Inside the Elbaroom
35 Invitation
36 Gribb
37 The Rising Son
38 At the Cherkassovs’
39 Sodomy
40 The Swing
41 Black Rider
42 Madame Jocasta
43 On Obsession
44 Ostriches & Intrusion
45 Media
46 The Pale Sorceresses
47 Death
48 Funerals
49 Retreat
50 Kill or Cure
51 Stone
52 Mrs O’Toole
53 Anagram
PART THREE: GRIMUS
54 Fifty-Four
55 The Stone Rose
Acknowledgements
Copyright
For Clarissa
About the Book
Flapping Eagle is a young Indian given the gift of immortality after drinking a magic fluid. Tiring of the burden of immortal life he sets off to find the mystical Calf Island, where he can rejoin the human race. His journey is peopled with strange assortments of characters, including the clumsy, loquacious Virgil Jones; his ugly, tragic companion, Dolores O’Toole; the wicked conjurer, Nicholas Deggle; the dainty, light-spirited Elfrida Gribb; and the enigmatic, pervasive Grimus, creator and controller of the mysterious island.
An enticing combination of science fantasy, storytelling and folklore makes this first novel by Salman Rushdie an epic adventure truly unlike any other.
About the Author
Salman Rushdie is the author of eleven novels – Grimus, Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence and Luka and the Fire of Life – one collection of short stories, and four works of non-fiction – The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, Step Across the Line and, as co-editor, The Vintage Book of Indian Writing.
He has received many awards for his writing including the European Union’s Aristeoin Prize for Literature. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Commander des Arts et des Lettres. In 2008 Midnight’s Children was adjudged the ‘Best of the Booker’, the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its forty year history.
ALSO BY SALMAN RUSHDIE
Fiction
Midnight’s Children
Shame
The Satanic Verses
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
East, West
The Moor’s Last Sigh
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Fury
Shalimar the Clown
The Enchantress of Florence
Non-fiction
The Jaguar Smile
Imaginary Homelands
Step Across This Line
Plays
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
(with Tim Supple and David Tushingham)
Midnight’s Children
(with Tim Supple and Simon Reade)
Anthology
The Vintage Book of Indian Writing (co-editor)
Go, go go, said the bird; human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
(T. S. Eliot)
Come, you lost atoms, to your Centre Draw,
and be the Eternal Mirror that you saw;
Rays that have wandered into darkness wide,
Return, and back into your sun subside.
(FARID-UD-DIN ’ATTAR,
The Conference of the Birds, trans. Fitzgerald)
Crow straggled, limply bedraggled his remnant.
He was his own leftover, the spat-out scrag.
He was what his brain could make nothing of.
(TED HUGHES,
Crow’s Playmates)
The sands of Time are steeped in new
Beginnings.
(Ignatius Q. Gribb,
The All-Purpose Quotable Philosophy)
The author would like to thank Messrs Faber & Faber for permission to quote from The Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot: Collected Poems, 1909–1962, and from Crow’s Playmates, Ted Hughes: Crow.
Mr Virgil Jones, a man devoid of friends and with a tongue rather too large for his mouth, was fond of descending this cliff-path on Tiusday mornings (Mr Jones, something of a pedant and interested in the origins of things, referred to the days of the week as Sunday, Moonday, Tiusday, Wodensday, Thorsday, Freyday and Saturnday; it was affectations like this, among other things, that had left him friendless.) It was five A.M.; for no reason, Mr Jones habitually chose this entirely random time to indulge his liking for Calf Island’s one small beach. Accordingly, he was tripping goat-fashion down the downward spiral of the path, trailing in the nimbler wake of a hunchbacked crone called Dolores O’Toole, who had an exceptionally beautiful walnut rocking-chair strapped to her back. The strap was Mr Jones’ belt. Which meant he was obliged to use both his hands to hold his trousers up. This kept him fairly preoccupied.
Some more facts about Mr Jones: he was gross of body and short of sight. His eyes blinked a lot, refusing to believe in their myopia. He had three initials: V.B.C. Jones, Esq. The B was for Beauvoir and the C for Chanakya. There were historical names, names to conjure with, and Mr Jones, though no conjurer, considered himself something of an historian. Today, as he arrived at the dead greysilver sands of his chosen island, surrounded by the greysilver mists that hung forever upon the surrounding, sundering seas, he was about to make his rendezvous with a small historical event. If he had known, he would have philosophized at length about the parade of history, about the historian’s inability to stand apart and watch; it was erroneous, he would have said, to look upon oneself as an Olympian chronicler; one was a member of the parade. An historian is affected by the present events that eternally recreate the past. He would have thought this earnestly, although for some time now the parade had been progressing without his help. However, because he was shortsighted, because of the mist and because he was trying to keep his trousers on, he didn’t see the body of one Flapping Eagle floating in on the incoming tide; and Dolores O’Toole was spared the trouble of being an audience.
Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment. Flapping Eagle, coming in fast now on the crest of a wave, was about to discover this fact. At present he was unconscious; he had just fallen through a hole in the sea. The sea had been the Mediterranean. It wasn’t now; or not quite.
The crone Dolores placed the rocking-chair on the sands. Mr Jones supervised approvingly. The rocking-chair faced away from the sea and towards the massive forested rock of Calf Mountain, which occupied most of the island except for the small clearing, directly above the beach, where Mr Jones and Dolores lived. Mr Jones sat down and began to rock.
Dolores O’Toole was a lapsed Catholic. She sometimes took unholy pleasure in the act of stimulating herself with church, or roman, candles. She did this because she was separated from her husband but not from her desires. Her sometime spouse, Mr O’Toole, ran a drinking establishment in K, the town high on the slopes of Calf Mountain, and she disapproved of K in general, of drinkers in particular and of her husband most particularly of all. She gave vent to this disapproval by living in isolation with Virgil Jones (far from K, from Mr O’Toole’s bar and from his favourite place of recreation, Madame Jocasta’s notorious bawdy-house). And every Tiusday at dawn she carried Mr Jones’ rocking-chair to the beach.
– Crestfallen, murmured Mr Jones to himself, with his back to the sea. Crestfallen, the sea today.
The body of Flapping Eagle touched land face upwards, which explains why he hadn’t drowned. He was quite near the back of Mr Jones’ rocking-chair, and the encroaching waves pushed him ever nearer and nearer. Mr Jones and Mrs O’Toole remained oblivious of his presence.
It should be pointed out that Flapping Eagle was averagely kind and good; but he would soon be responsible for a large number of deaths. He was also as sane as the next man, but then the next man was Mr Virgil Jones.
There was an extraordinary coincidence involved in the relationship of Virgil Jones and Dolores O’Toole: they loved each other and found it impossible to declare their love. It was no beautiful love, for they were extremely ugly. It was undeclared, because each had been so badly damaged by experience that they preferred to nurture their feelings in the privacy of their own bosoms, rather than expose them to possible ridicule and rejection. So they would sit close, but separated by this privacy, and Dolores would sing cracked songs, toothless rimes of mourning requition; while Virgil would talk his lilting elliptical talk, exercising the thoughts and the tongue which were both too large for his head to hold, and there on the deserted beach was as close as they came to joy.
Whitebeard is all my love and whitebeard is my desire, sang Dolores dolefully, to the rhythm of the swaying rocking-chair. Virgil, lost in thought, stroked his white-grizzled chin and did not hear.
– Language, he mused, language makes concepts. Concepts make chains. I am bound, Dotty, bound and I don’t know where. Not enough of the ether for the way of Grimus, not enough of the earth for the way of K, moving pingpongways in thought between them and you. Dolores O’Thule. Sorrow of the gods. My dear, I was not always as you see me now. The terror of the titties, I. Once. Then. Before.
–Early one morning, just as the Son was borning, I a maiden crying in the valley below, wailed Dolores.
The insensate Eagle was within a foot of the rockers.
– This island, muttered Virgil Jones firmly, but under his breath, is the most terrible place in all creation. Since we seem to survive and are not sucked into its ways, we seem to love.
He would have reflected further, on ritual, on obsession, on the neuroses and displacement activities that exile creates, on age, on entrapment, on friendship and love, on the state of his corns, on the ornithology of myth, and refined and invented thoughts in the peace of Dolores’ presence; and she would have sung further, until her songs dropped a tear from her eyes; and then they would have gone home.
But at that moment the body of Flapping Eagle came to rest against the perfectly-carved rockers of the perfectly-carved rocking-chair with the perfectly-carved dancers spiralling along them. The chair, thus affronted, stopped rocking.
– Death, exclaimed Dolores in terror. Death, from the sea . . .
Virgil Jones didn’t reply, having a mouth full of the sea which had lodged in Flapping Eagle’s lungs. But he, too, as he breathed life back into the stranger, was alarmed.
– No, he said eventually, willing himself and Dolores to believe it. The face is too pale.
A remarkable fact about Flapping Eagle’s arrival at Calf Island: the island-dwellers, who shouldn’t have been too surprised at his arrival, found it highly disturbing, even unnerving. Whereas Flapping Eagle himself, once he acquired a certain piece of knowledge, rapidly came to accept his arrival as entirely unremarkable.
The piece of knowledge was this:
No-one ever came to Calf Island by accident.
The mountain drew its own kind to itself.
Or perhaps it was Grimus who did that.
The day had begun well enough. That is to say, it resembled the previous day sufficiently (in terms of weather, temperature and mood) to give the half-sleeping young man the illusion of continuity. Yet it also differed sufficiently from the recently-passed (in terms of subtle things like the direction of the wind, the cries of the swooping birds above and the squawks of the womenfolk below) to produce an equal and opposite illusion of temporal movement. The young man was basking pleasurably in these conflicting and harmonious mirages, drifting slowly up towards consciousness, which would banish both and substitute a third illusion: the present.
I was the boy. I was Joe-Sue, Axona Indian, orphan, named ambiguously at birth because my sex was uncertain until some time later, virgin, young brother of a wild female animal called Bird-Dog, who was scared of losing her beauty, which was ironic, for she was not beautiful. It was my (his) twenty-first birthday, too, and I was about to become Flapping Eagle. And cease to be a few other people.
(I was Flapping Eagle.)
The Axona aren’t interested in twenty-first birthdays. They celebrate only puberty, loss of virginity, proof of bravery, marriage and death. At puberty the Old took goats’ hairs and tied them like a beard round my face, while the Sham-Man anointed my newly-potent organs with the entrails of a hare, for fertility, chanting to the god Axona as he did so.
The god Axona had only two laws: he liked the Axona to chant to him as often as possible, in the field, on the toilet, while making love if concentration allowed; and he instructed the Axona to be a race apart and have no doings with the wicked world. I never had much time for the god Axona, especially after I reached puberty, because once my voice cracked it became extremely infelicitous and I gave up chanting entirely. And then there was Bird-Dog and her fondness for the outside world. If it hadn’t been for this fondness, she might never have met the pedlar Sispy; and then she might never have left, and then I might never have left, and it would all have been different. Or perhaps there would inevitably have been a Sispy.
Let me explain some things. I grew up on a table-top in what is, I believe, still known as the United States, or, colloquially, Amerindia. The table-top was self-supporting: that is to say, it produced all the food the Axona required. No Axona had ever descended from this plateau to the plains beneath; and after a few battles in which the wicked world discovered how impregnable a fortress Axona was, they left us alone. Bird-Dog was the first Axona to visit the plains as far as I know; she was certainly the first to learn the language and develop a distinct taste or affinity for them.
To understand Bird-Dog, it is necessary to know that we were orphans, Bird-Dog and Joe-Sue. My mother died moments before I was born, which is why my formal given name was Born-From-Dead. Joe-Sue is what they called me to spare me hurt. Though whether it is painless to be known for twenty-one years by a hermaphrodite’s name, which causes every eligible female to recoil for fear of breaking tabu, I leave others to judge.
My father died soon afterwards, leaving the thirteen-year-old Bird-Dog with full responsibility for me. Bird-Dog was not her formal given name. Nobody ever told me what that was. She took it for herself, as a brave’s name, at the age of sixteen.
This was not a popular move among the Axona, but Bird-Dog and I were never much loved after the death of my people. This is why: orphans in Axona are like mongrels among pedigree hounds. We were near-pariah from the moment my father passed on, and our natures exacerbated our plight.
Bird-Dog had always been a free spirit. I say this with some envy, for I never was, nor am. Conventions did not touch her, artifice never seized her. As a child she was drawn to the bow and arrow and loathed the stove and cauldron, much to the dismay of the Old. This was a stroke of luck for me. It meant she could forage food for us. It meant she was as good in the fields as most young men. Bird-Dog was a born provider. With breasts. Breasted providers were anathema to the Axona.
As I grew, the disapproval became more and more overt. Conversation would stop at the water well when I approached. Shoulders grew cold when Bird-Dog passed. Noses tilted into the air, the Axona ostracized us as far as they could. They could not expel us; we had committed no crime. But they didn’t have to like us, so they didn’t.
– Well, said Bird-Dog to me when I was sixteen (and a young, helpless sixteen I was), if they don’t want us, we can do without them.
– Yes, I said, we can do without. I said it sadly, because though I was easily influenced by Bird-Dog, I had the adolescent’s latent love of acceptability.
– We’ll just have to find our friends elsewhere. She said it casually if a little defiantly. She had obviously brooded on it for years. It was a sentence which would change our present, our future, our whole lives. Of course, Joe-Sue agreed with his big, competent, manly sister.
What Bird-Dog never accused me of, what I found out only after she had gone, was that the main reason, the true cause of our detachment from our tribe, was not our orphan status, not her manliness, not her taking of a brave’s name, not her general demeanour, not her at all. It was me, Joe-Sue.
For three reasons: first, my confused sex; second, the circumstances of my birth; and third, my pigmentation. To take them in order. To be a hermaphrodite among the Axona is to be very bad medicine. A monster. To mutate from that state into a ‘normal’ male is akin to black magic. They didn’t like that. To be what I was, born from dead, was a dire omen; if I could bring death at the moment of my birth, it would sit upon my shoulder like a vulture wherever I went. As for my colouring: the Axona are a dark-skinned race and shortish. As I grew, it became apparent that I was, inexplicably, to be fair-skinned and tallish. This further genetic aberration – whiteness – meant they were frightened of me and shied away from contact.
Because they were frightened, they gave us a measure of respect. Because I was a freak, they gave us a measure of scorn.
It goes without saying that Bird-Dog and I were very close indeed. How much she suffered because of my deformities, she never said. It was a mark of her love.
So, unconsciously, from those early days, I was being equipped for the voyage to Calf Island. I was an exile in an isolated community, and I clung to my love for my sister as a castaway to driftwood.
That day, when Bird-Dog spoke the unspeakable, she let me into a secret.
– Before I was your age I went Down, she said. I was shocked. In those days the idea of breaking the law of Axona still shocked me.
– When I was your age I went into the town, she said, and listened at a window outside an eating-place. There was a singing machine there. It sang about a creature called a bird-dog, clever, fiendish. It feared the creature. I thought: that is the brave’s name for me.
In a state of semi-shock, I asked: – What about the Demons? and my voice stuttered. How did you escape the Whirling Demons?
She tossed her head. – Easy, she said with contempt. They’re nothing at all but air, they aren’t.
Ever since that day, Bird-Dog made frequent journeys into town. She would return full of tales of moving pictures and fast-moving machines; of machines that gave water and food, and of such numbers and numbers of people . . . I never had the courage to accompany her. It was there, in the town, that she learnt about twenty-first birthdays. – That’s the day you’ll prove you’re a brave, she said. You’ll go into town; and what’s more you’ll go in alone.
It was also the day she met Mr Sispy and was given eternal life.
As I said, the day began well enough for young Joe-Sue. But once he was awake it gave the lie to its beginnings.
It was Joe-Sue’s birthday: I got up and went outside. The sky was a blinding blue. The table-top dotted with red-brown tents was a deep, rich green, a green thumb sticking sorely above a rich-red, barren-brown world. If the Whirling Demons were whirling below, they couldn’t catch me, and all seemed right with the world.
Bird-Dog was sitting on an outcrop of rock, a grown woman of thirty-four years, three months and four days, in rags, her hair falling blackly over the olive face. She clutched two small bottles. The one in her right hand was full of bright yellow liquid. The one in her left hand was full of bright blue liquid. Colour was rampant everywhere, except in my skin. I felt a cloud pass across the sun.
The gleam of excitement in Bird-Dog’s face as she crouched eagerly over her treasures dispelled the bleak moment.
– I’ve been down, she said, to see if the Whirling Demons are quiet today. They’re quiet. It’s all right. But her voice was absent, her eyes stared fiercely at the brightly-coloured phials.
– I met a man between here and the town, she said distantly. He gave me these.
– What are they? Who was he? Why did he give you them?
– He was a pedlar. His name was Mr Sispy. Nice man. Funny name, Sispy. He gave them to me because I wanted them.
– But what do they do?
– They’ll keep me young, she said, clutching them ever more tightly. Or at least this one will. She held up the yellow phial.
– For how long? I asked timorously. The shadow was back.
– Forever, she screamed triumphantly, and then burst into tears. With my arms around her, moistened by her tears of frightened joy, I asked:
– What does the other one do, the blue one?
She didn’t answer at once.
Now that I am so much older, I am not at all sure what the word magician means. To Joe-Sue that day, born and raised as he was in a tribe where magic intermingled continually with daily life, it meant anyone apparently in possession of powers, or knowledge, which he himself lacked. Perhaps that’s the only sense in which the word has meaning; and by that definition, for Joe-Sue and Bird-Dog as they were then, Mr Sispy was unquestionably a magician. This is how Bird-Dog described their encounter:
– I was sitting behind a rock watching for Whirling Demons and suddenly behind me there was this voice whispering SISPY SISPY it said and I whirled fast as any demon to find where he WAS and he knew my name. Bird-Dog he whispered and the sound sounded so harsh on his lips because he spoke so softly and sighing like the breeze in a whisper it was, his voice the whole world in a whisper such a spell it was. Bird-Dog are you beautiful he asked and since he asked it it was so and I answered yes, yes I am beautiful if you say it and he said yes you are beautiful but Bird-Dog you will die such a word it sounded harsh as my name on his lips so I cried. Sispy I cried Sispy. Such a smile it was the sun in it and the summer too he smiled and I could not cry. The world is full of secrets he said and surprises. I say Sispy behind you and here I am surprising you. With a secret in my sack. I travel he said and search for the likes of you, like seeking like, passing on my little secret. The beauty of it is: with it you will stay beautiful, you will not die, you will have the gift of time to search out all you wish to seek, to learn all you wish to know, to accomplish all you wish to do, to become all you wish to be. And the horror of it is: all who possess the secret wish in the end to give it up, it weighing them down like a last straw at last, and the camel’s back bends and passes through the eye of the needle. Then he gave me the drinks, yellow for the sun and brightness and life and blue for infinity and calm and release when I want it. Life in a yellow bottle, death blue as the sky, ice-blue as steel, he said. He was so badly-dressed, a poor pedlar’s dress and a large sack of patches with drawings drawn on it and he turned to go. I said I have a brother called Born-From-Dead and today is his brave’s day, have you secrets for him? He had, the same for young Born-From-Dead, he said. Then before he went he said, for those who will not use the blue there is only one place I know of; I am going there now and someday if you will not use the blue you will come with me. And finally he said: tell your brother Born-From-Dead that all eagles come at last to eyrie and all sailors come at last to shore. SISPY SISPY he whispered to the breeze and shivered and then he wasn’t there.
Bird-Dog was not normally a voluble woman so Joe-Sue would have found her speech strange even if it had been about the weather. As it was it was shattering. She reached into a deep pocket of her rags and brought out two more bottles, identical to her own proud possessions. They were his, mine. The yellow eternity of life and the blue eternity of death. Joe-Sue took them and ran into his tent, scrabbling in the earth to bury them under his sleeping-mat. When he came out again the yellow bottle stood empty and the blue bottle lay dashed to fragments on the rock where Bird-Dog sat. – Death, she said. Death to death.
But Joe-Sue didn’t drink his. It would soon be a division between them.
After a long silence, in which distances stretched like universes in every direction, she said, with her old aggressive practicality, – Off with you now Joe-Sue, off with you to town.
So I went down the side of the Axona table-top to the plain of the Whirling Demons that I had been taught to fear; but the little whirlwinds that spring up on that barren plain soon proved, as Bird-Dog had said, to be nothing but air, so I reached the town without trouble, dancing easily out of their way. I saw automobiles and launderettes and juke-boxes and all kinds of machines and people dressed in dusty clothes with a kind of despair in their eyes; I saw it all hiding behind doors and fences and lurking in corridors and I don’t think I was seen. Finally I’d seen enough; the glimpse had infected me already and entirely though I didn’t know it yet, just as it had infected Bird-Dog.
And the people in the town were white.
A curious thing happened on my way up to the table-top. I saw an eagle sitting on a rock, about shoulder-height to me, looking at me. It stopped me in my tracks, I tell you. A great full-grown cruel-looking monster of an eagle. I moved slowly, slowly, closer and closer to the bird. It didn’t move, showed no sign of fear, as if it were expecting me. I stretched out my hands; it came peacefully into my grasp. I was astonished yet again on this astonishing day. I held it and stroked it a moment and then, abruptly, as unexpectedly violent as it had been calm, it began to fight me. Of course I released my grip rapidly, but not before that cruel beak had scarred my chest. It flew away. I watched it go; you could say a part of me went with it.
– Flapping Eagle. The voice was Bird-Dog’s. She had been watching, silently.
– That is your name. Flapping Eagle. Why else do you think the eagle came to you before attacking you? It’s your brave’s name, it must be.
– Flapping Eagle, said Joe-Sue aloud. Yes.
– It’s a name to live up to, said Bird-Dog.
– Yes, I said.
– And now’s the time to start, she said. She lay down on the rock where she had sat to watch me with the eagle, and raised her ragged skirts.
So, on one day, I was offered eternal life, broke the law of the Axona, took a brave’s name from an omen and lost my virginity to my sister. It was enough to make a fellow believe there was something special about being twenty-one.
The Sham-Man entered Flapping Eagle’s tent brandishing his ju-ju stick like a sad, sadistic schoolmaster, filled with deep regret for the grief he loved to cause. The Sham-Man said he only loved bringing pain to others when it was forced on him by his duty, for he loved his work. He was a huge, shambling, beaded walrus to Flapping Eagle’s tense, terse, silent oyster.
– My apologies, said the Sham-Man mournfully, for intruding. I believe we have a slightly delicate matter to discuss. (Flapping Eagle noticed his mouth; it was watering at the edges.)
– Ahem, continued the Sham-Man, I just wondered, have you any idea at all where . . . she . . . is? In common with most of the Axona, he was reluctant to concede to Bird-Dog her right to a brave’s name; also in common with most of the Axona, he’d forgotten what she had been called before.
– No, said Flapping Eagle. But she’s not here. Not in Axona.
– Precisely. You realize this puts us both into a rather awkward position?Vis-à-vis the law, you see.
It really was very simple. Bird-Dog’s sudden disappearance meant Flapping Eagle, as next of kin and sole surviving family, was at last open to attack by the Axona. As the lawbreaker could not be punished, so her guilt fell upon him. There was only one punishment: exile.
All that Bird-Dog had said was: I saw Sispy again today. We’re leaving. That was in the small hours of the morning. It was only later that Flapping Eagle had been struck by the thought that he was exactly as old today as Bird-Dog had been on the day she first met the pedlar. Thirty-four years, three months and four days. It was as if his future had touched her past.
It was an abrupt departure, but then the two of them had been growing away from each other ever since Flapping Eagle’s refusal to drink the yellow elixir. To him, it had been faintly nauseating to watch Bird-Dog petrified at an immutable age, her cells reproducing perfectly every day, not a hair falling that wasn’t replaced by a new one. And for Bird-Dog, the spectacle of her little brother growing up towards her daily was a constant rejection of herself and the decision she had made. It was the first and only important thing in which Flapping Eagle had not followed her lead.
They hadn’t even made love for several years; both of them missed it. Still, thought Flapping Eagle, now she’s got Sispy. A pedlar’s woman: tame ending for her.
The Sham-Man was clearing his throat again. Flapping Eagle forced himself to listen to his equivocations.
– Health, you know, said the walrus pontifically, is a tricky thing. Awfully tricky. The thing is to make sure one is always one jump ahead. Craftier than the slinking germ, if you follow me. Catch the worm before it turns, eh, eh?
The Axona was obsessed with health and cleanliness. They used more metaphors deriving from this preoccupation than the wildest hypochondriac.
– At this moment (the Sham-Man’s face shaped itself into a mask of tragedy) I’m afraid the corpse of opinion is dead against you, old chap.
– Corpus, said Flapping Eagle.
– Exactly. Dead against. Temperatures are rising. There is a fever abroad in the land, if you take my meaning. There are those who diagnose a modicum of blood-letting (his lips curled into an expression of elegant distaste) but of course I’m not wholly in agreement with them. See their point, mind you. Just don’t happen to agree. Must be my liberal upbringing.
– What is your position, asked Flapping Eagle.
– Ah. My position. Ah. Now there’s a question. I quote the sayings of Axona, correct me if I get anything wrong: ‘All that is Unaxona is Unclean.’ I’m afraid we really can’t have contamination around here, you know. Spreads like wildfire. And before you know it, poof, there’s a disease. Nothing against you personally, naturally. Always thought you more sinned against and so forth. But there you are, what can one do, she’s got you for the high jump, I’m afraid. After all you may already be infected.
– So what do you suggest?
– Tell you what, TELL you WHAT. Why not, this evening, under cover of darkness, you follow, why not just slip away completely? Save a lot of unpleasant scenes. That’s what I suggest. Think about it. I’m really very sorry about all this.
*
Flapping Eagle, alone in his tent, scrabbled furiously at the floor. Then he had them: the yellow and the blue. – At least, he thought, if I am to live in the Outside, I may as well give myself one advantage. He drained the life-giving fluid. It tasted bitter-sweet. He put the blue bottle in a pocket.
I mentioned that life among the Axona prepared me in many ways for Calf Island. One of the ways was this: it taught Flapping Eagle the power of obsession.
The town was called Phoenix because it had risen from the ashes of a great fire which had completely destroyed the earlier and much larger city also called Phoenix. Nobody knew why the city had been given that name. It was a small town now.
When Livia Cramm drove through towns like Phoenix, she kept her eyes skinned, while affecting a pose of languid boredom. Mrs Cramm was a human predator; she consumed the passion of men with an entirely unwholesome glee. The unfortunate Mr Cramm, a small, bespectacled, inadequate billionaire, had long ago been drained by her of all his vital juices and expired in her crushing embrace, murmuring words of endearment and leaving her all his billions in his will. He also left her his vehicles, his horses, his Amerindian and Caucasian estates, and best of all his yacht. If there was one thing that could seduce Mrs Cramm away from seduction, it was the sea. It was a love she and Mr Cramm had shared: the only love they had shared.
– Mr Cramm, Mrs Cramm was fond of saying, in the days before she refined her speech, had a favourite joke about the sea. Whenever you’re sad or confused, he would declare, the thing to do is contemplate your naval. Navel, you see. Mr Cramm always did have a terrible sensayuma. He used to call me his Jungfrau, being something of a polyglot. When I asked him why he’d say quick as anything, baby, you sure ain’t no Freudlein! Oh, Jee-Zuss, that sensayuma. I like a man that makes me laugh. Especially when he’s got a maritime background.
These days Mrs Cramm, being past her prime, was more refined and less choosy. She liked them young, but not too young; tall, but not too tall; fair, but with a hint of dark. Otherwise she took them as they came. She kept her eyes skinned in towns like Phoenix because they were full of youngish, tallish, fair-to-darkish, hopelessly broke possibles.
So seeing Flapping Eagle quickened her pulse noticeably. The thrill of the chase had never palled on Livia Cramm. Yoicks, she thought.
– Hey you there with the big eyes, she called. Coo-ee.
Flapping Eagle stopped mooching idly down the street. The can he had been kicking came clattering to rest.
– Like a job?
– Doing what? Flapping Eagle tried not to show his eagerness.
– Oh, you know, earning money, shouted Mrs Cramm. Odd jobs. Stuff like that.
Flapping Eagle considered for about one second. He came up to her huge car.
– Ma’am, he said, where I come from, we have a saying. A live dog is better than a dead lion, but death is preferable to poverty.
– I can see, said Mrs Cramm, we’re going to have a fascinating relationship. I like a man with brains.
As the car swept off, Flapping Eagle reflected that once again he was being ruled by an older woman. Hot on the heels of this thought came the notion that he didn’t mind. I was an adaptable sort of man, more a chameleon than an eagle, better at reaction than action. Whereas Mrs Cramm looked good for some action.
Flapping Eagle never liked Nicholas Deggle. He couldn’t understand, for one thing, what he was to Livia Cramm. He appeared to do little more than the occasional conjuring trick and receive large sums of money – and the odd jewel – for doing it.
– Gifts, darling, was Mrs Cramm’s explanation. He’s a friend of mine and a genius what’s more. A real malin talent. Can’t I give my friends presents?
Nicholas Deggle never looked like a genius in Flapping Eagle’s eyes: except perhaps in that he had a genuine gift for accepting his benefactor’s munificence graciously. Nor, in his dark svelte finery, ring-laden and perfumed, with a rose in his buttonhole, did he look as if he needed the gifts.
Being absolved from the depredations of age, Flapping Eagle missed the key to Livia’s dependence on Deggle. As she aged, she became increasingly absorbed in the supernatural. She devoured the tarot, the scriptures, the cabbala, palmistry, anything and everything which held that the world was more than it seemed; that the physical end was not, in fact, the end. Since Deggle shared her interests and was a good deal more expert than she, Livia Cramm found him indispensable.
Deggle was in the habit of carrying around what he called his wand. This was an extraordinary object: cylindrical, some six inches long, slightly curving. The extraordinary thing was that it was made of solid stone. Flapping Eagle had never seen the like.
– Where did you find that? he once asked. Deggle looked at him quizzically and replied:
– It is the stem of a stone rose; I broke it off. Flapping Eagle felt foolish; by asking the question he had laid himself open to the ridicule of the answer.
The wand would be used in Deggle’s occasional displays of conjuring skill. He would stand, long-nosed and dark, in a black cloak, and conjure marvels from the air. Even Flapping Eagle was impressed at these displays, and disliked Deggle even more for impressing him. The conjurer never revealed his secrets, but they made Livia dote upon him.
Once, after such a display, Livia was eager to show off her own supernatural skills. She beckoned Flapping Eagle imperiously. – Come over here, she said, and let Livia read your darling hand.
Flapping Eagle approached suspiciously. Livia looked and squeezed and felt and prodded; and assumed an air of great gravity.
– Well, my Eagle, she said, What a terrible hand it is.
Flapping Eagle’s heart missed an involuntary beat.
– Are you sure you want to know? asked Mrs Cramm seriously.
Flapping Eagle thought: she makes it sound as though I have a choice. He looked into her eager eyes, glistening with their dread knowledge, and nodded.
Livia Cramm closed her eyes and intoned:
– You will live long and except for one serious illness be very healthy. The illness is an illness of the mind, but you will recover from it, though it may have a profound effect upon your career. You will neither marry nor father children. You will have no profession; nor do you have great talent. Your luck is bad. It is your lot to be led by others; in the end you will accept this. But most of all you are dangerous. You will bring grief and suffering and pain to those you know. Not intentionally; you are not malicious. But you are a bringer of ill winds. Where you walk, walks Death.
Flapping Eagle had to tense his muscles to prevent his hand from quivering. Without knowing about it, Livia Cramm had reiterated the curse on his birth and his given name.
She looked up and smiled as if to comfort him.
– But you are very attractive, she said in her usual voice.
Deggle smiled too.
Mrs Cramm’s dependence on Deggle grew unceasingly. Whenever Flapping Eagle made a suggestion, that they should sail here, or winter there, or even eat at such and such a place, it irked him to observe the slight questioning inclination of her head in Deggle’s direction before she delightedly agreed or gently demurred. There was no appeal from her decisions.
Two phrases usually formed the focal point of Flapping Eagle’s irritation. One was Livia Cramm’s. Whenever Deggle let drop some dark conversational flower from those saturnine lips, she would clap her hands excitedly, like a pubertal girl shown a naughty thing behind a rosebush, and exclaim (meticulously cultivated accent slipping in her transport) – Ain’t that the Deggle himself talkin’ to you. And she would look gleamingly pleased with the wickedness of the pun. At which Flapping Eagle clamped his mouth shut and stifled his thoughts.
The second phrase was Deggle’s own. He came and went his unknowable way, sauntering in and out of Mrs Cramm’s villa on the southern coast of Morispain, and every time he left, he would wave unsmilingly and say: – Ethiopia!
It was a complex and awful joke, arising from the archaic name of that closed, hidden, historical country (Abyssinia . . . I’ll be seeing you) and it drove Flapping Eagle out of his mind every time it was said. Ethiopia. Ethiopia. Ethiopia.
Deggle made Flapping Eagle wonder if he could bear his chosen fate.
He had been with Livia Cramm now, her personal gigolo, for twenty-five years. His reasoning was very simple: He had time, more than any in the universe but he had no money. She had a great deal of money and very little time. Thus, by sacrificing a small amount of his time he could very likely acquire a large amount of her cash. It was his most cynical decision, born of desperation, born from the future of dead possibilities that stared him in the face when Mrs Cramm had noticed him in Phoenix. He would have felt a great deal of guilt about it except for one thing: he did not like Livia Cramm.
Livia had been forty-five when she first met Flapping Eagle, and was then a ruined beauty of still-considerable sexual attraction and magnetism. Now, at seventy, the sexual attraction had gone. The magnetism had become an obnoxious, claustrophobic clinging. She clutched Flapping Eagle fiercely, as though she would never let go until he died on her as the unlamented Oscar Cramm had done so many years ago. In public her bony claws of hands never released him; in private she lay, her head eternally on his lap, gripping her own legs till her knuckles stood out whitely; in bed, she squeezed him with a strength so remarkable, it often left him winded. If she saw him speak to another woman she would descend upon them and in her cracked old tones deliver herself of a ringingly vulgar insult which sent the unfortunate female scurrying for shelter. Then she would apologize to Flapping Eagle, trying to look little-girl-coy (which was a sickening sight) and say: – I’m sorry, loveliest, did I spoil your fun then, did I?
There was no escape from Mrs Cramm.
Deggle had arrived on the scene comparatively recently: only eighteen months or so. This had made life even less supportable because Flapping Eagle was now no longer even the one who helped Livia decide the next step in her trivial, perpetually-dying life. He was just a symbol of her pulling power, male physical beauty incarnate, and thinking was no part of his duties. He was her refuge from the lonely blasts of antiquity.
– My Eagle never grows old, she would say proudly. Look at him: fifty-one (Flapping Eagle had lied to her about his age when they first met) and doesn’t look a day over thirty. Wonderful what good screwing can do.
Her politer acquaintances replied: – He’s not the only one, Livia. You’re incredible yourself, you know. Which had been the point of her comment. There were less and less of these acquaintances left.
Flapping Eagle’s only permitted source of regular human contact was, of course, Nicholas Deggle. And so cramped, so enclosed by the engulfing Mrs Cramm did he feel, that every so often he would make use of this source. He tried to tell himself that he treated Deggle as a social whore, in the same way as he was Livia’s sexual whore; but Deggle got the better of their exchanges too regularly to be so described.
Deggle reclined on a brocaded sofa.
– The issue is beyond doubt, he drawled. Livia Cramm is a monster.
Flapping Eagle said nothing.
– La Femme-Crampon, said Deggle, and laughed, a shrill, falsetto noise.
– What?
– My dear Eagle, I’ve just realized. Do you know into whose clutches you have fallen? He was beside himself with laughter at his incomprehensible joke.
Flapping Eagle gave him his feed-line. – Go on. Tell me who it is.
– But my dear, c’est la Femme-Crampon! The clutching woman. Or, as you’d say, the Old Woman of the Sea! The Vieillarde herself!
He clutched his sides in agonies of mirth. (I sat ashen-faced and silent. There were times when Deggle frightened me.)
– It’s all true, he burst out between uncontrollable spasms. She’s old enough. She’s ugly enough. She lives for sea-travel. She picks up wandering youths like yourself, though you’re not as young as you look. And now she’s got you in her clutches, to squeeze and tighten and constrict until there’s no breath left in your body. Livia Cramm, the terror of voyagers! Why, she’s even taught you to love the sea to make it easier to rule you! Poor sailor, poor pretty-faced matelot that you are. You’re no more than a walking corpse with the Old Woman on your back, her legs gripping tightly, tightly, like the knot that tightens as you wrestle with it, tightly round your, ha ha, windpipe.
I wouldn’t even bother to struggle, he finished, wiping away the tears.
And this was another conversation with Nicholas Deggle:
– Have you ever wondered about old Oscar Cramm?
– Not really, said Flapping Eagle. He had had too many other things to wonder about.
– He never had a chance with that old man-eater, said Deggle. They say he passed on while making love to her, you know. I wonder if there were any bite-marks in his neck.
– Are you saying . . . began Flapping Eagle.
– Possibly I am, smiled Deggle. He wasn’t all that old, you know. Now if Livia were to think that you were getting on a bit yourself, she might begin to fancy a change.
– You have absolutely no reason . . . began Flapping Eagle, but Deggle interrupted again. It was quite remarkable how few of his sentences Flapping Eagle ever finished when in conversation with this dark smiler.
– I merely mean, said Deggle, that for some unknown reason I feel quite attached to you, I shouldn’t like to see you come to any harm, pretty-face.
After this conversation Flapping Eagle found himself watching Mrs Cramm; and when her legs constricted or her arms squeezed him, he remembered the passing of Oscar Cramm and became nervous. Which hampered his sexual duties on more than one occasion, and on these occasions he saw Livia Cramm frown thoughtfully and purse her lips before assuring him that it didn’t matter. She would sip from the jug of water that always sat by her bedside, surrounded by her army of pills, and turn away from him to sleep.
One night, Flapping Eagle had a curious dream. Livia Cramm had both her attenuated hands fixed vice-like around his throat and was pushing, pushing with her thumbs. He was sleeping in his dream and awoke in it to find his life being squeezed away. He wrestled then, wrestled for his life, and as he did so she changed continually into all manner of wet, stinking, shapeless, slippery things. He could not grip her and all the time her hold was tightening. Just before he fainted he forced out these words:
– You are old, Livia. Old hag. You’ll never find another.
All of a sudden (he could see nothing now: it was black inside his eyes) the hold relaxed. He heard Livia’s voice say: – Yes, my eagle, my soaring bird. Yes.
When he awoke, he found Livia Cramm dead as a stone, both hands fixed clawingly about her own neck. The jug of water was upset; her army of pills was substantially diminished.
It was only later that morning that Flapping Eagle discovered that his own precious bottle, the phial with the blue, release-giving liquid, had disappeared. He went to confront Deggle, who reclined as usual on the brocaded sofa in the drawing-room, his habitual dark clothing for once appropriate.
– Livia didn’t seem the sort to commit suicide, he said.
– What sort is that, foolish boy? asked Deggle. She was old.
– You don’t know about a certain bottle disappearing, do you? asked Flapping Eagle.
– You’re overwrought, said Deggle. I like you, you know. What you need, my boy, is to get away from all this. Take the yacht. Sail into the, ha ha, blue.
What can you say to a man who may or may not be a murderer, who may or may not have saved your life?
– You really are remarkably well-preserved, smiled Deggle. You must have a guardian angel.
Flapping Eagle thought: Or devil.