7 Lost in Nebulous Time

There was once a young man named Desiderio who set out upon a journey and very soon lost himself completely. When he thought he had reached his destination, it turned out to be only the beginning of another journey infinitely more hazardous than the first for now she smiled a little and told me that we were quite outside the formal rules of time and place and, in fact, had been so since I met her in her disguise. We moved through the landscape of Nebulous Time her father had brought into being but could no longer control because the sets of samples were buried under a mountain. She appeared abstracted and remote.

At first the landscape looked only like that of any tropical forest, though this in itself was marvellous enough to me. Nothing I had seen in the low-lying, poorly forested temperate zones that bore me had prepared me for the supernal and tremendous energy of the rearing colonnades of palm which concluded in an interwoven roof of limbs and lianas high above our heads. I would have experienced a green panic there, among those giant forms far older than even my antique race if Albertina had not walked beside me, picking us a safe path as delicately as a cat through undergrowth where strange, flesh-eating flowers writhed as if in perturbed slumber for this forest was also cannibal and full of perils.

All the plants distilled poisons. This essential hostility was not directed at us or at any comer; the forest was helplessly, motivelessly malign. The blossoms on the creepers snapped their teeth at nothing or something, dragonfly or snake or hushed breeze, with an objective spontaneity. They could not help but be inimical. The leaves let through only a greenish dazzle and a lonely silence pressed against our ears like fur for the trees grew too close together for birds to fly or sing. Heavily armed, Albertina walked with the proud defiance of an Empress of the Exotic.

‘My Albertina, how could you possibly have been both Lafleur and the Madame at the same time?’

‘Nothing simpler,’ she replied. She had the slightest trace of an unfamiliar accent and she chose her words and organized her sentences with the excessive pedantry of one who uses a second language perfectly, though I never found out exactly what her first tongue had been. But her mother tongue, or the tongue of her mother, was Chinese.

‘I projected myself upon the available flesh of the Madame. After all, was it not put out for hire? Lafleur in the stable, among the whickering horses, projected himself, myself, into the Bestial Room, myself in the bodily clothing of the Madame. She was a real but ephemeral show. Under the influence of intense longing, the spirit – or, let us even say, the soul – of the sufferer can create a double which joins the absent beloved while the original template goes about its everyday business. Oh, Desiderio! never underestimate the power of that desire for which you are named! One night, Yang Yu-chi shot what he thought was a wild ox and his arrow pierced a rock up to the feathering because of his passionate conviction the rock lived.’

I did not mind her lecturing me because she was so beautiful. I told her that, at that moment, I desired her with the greatest imaginable intensity but she only said she had been given her orders and was afraid that we must wait.

‘Let us be amorous but also mysterious,’ she said, quoting one of her selves with so much ironic grace that I was charmed enough to shrug away my disappointment and resign myself to walking through the wood beside her. Presently she shot a small, rabbit-like animal as it sat on a boulder washing its face with its paw and when we came to a clearing as the shadows deepened into those of evening, I skinned it while she lit a fire with the tinder box she found in the soldier’s girdle and then cooked supper. After we ate, we sat together watching the red embers dissolve and we talked.

‘Yes; the Count was dangerous. I was keeping him under the closest surveillance. It was my most important mission of the whole war. I would have taken him to my father’s castle if I could, to enlist him in our campaign for he was a man of great power though he was sometimes a little ludicrous because the real world fell so far short of his desires. But he did what he could to bring it up to his own level, even if his will exceeded his self-knowledge. And so he invented those macabre clowns, the Pirates of Death.

‘What was chilling, even appalling, in the Count’s rapacity was its purely cerebral quality. He was the most metaphysical of libertines. If he had passions, they were as lucid and intellectual as those of a geometrician. He approached the flesh in the manner of one about to give the proof of a theorem and, however exiguous those passions seemed to him, they were never unpremeditated. He acted the tyrant to his passions. However convulsive the grand guignol in his bed, he had always planned it well beforehand and rehearsed it so often in his brain that his performance perfectly simulated an improvisation. His desire became authentic because it was so absolutely synthetic.

‘Yet it remained only a simulation. He may have jetted his sperm in positive torrents but he never released any energy. Instead, he released a force that was the opposite of energy, a devitalizing force quite unlike – though just as powerful as – the kind of electricity which naturally flows between a man and a woman during the sexual act.

(She gently took my hand away from her breast and murmured in parenthesis: ‘Not yet.’)

‘Yet his performance was remarkable. In bed, one could almost have believed the Count was galvanized by an external dynamo. This galvanic mover was his will. And, indeed, his fatal error was to mistake his will for his desire –’

I interrupted her with a certain irritation.

‘But how is one to distinguish between the will and a desire?’

‘Desire can never be coerced,’ said Albertina with the crispness of a pedagogue even though, at that moment, she was coercing mine. She immediately resumed her discourse.

‘– and so he willed his own desires.’

I interrupted her again.

‘How was it he never found out you were a woman?’

‘Because he only ever took me backwardly, i.e. in anum,’ she explained patiently. ‘And, besides, his lusts always blinded him completely to anything but his own sensations.’

Then she took up her thread again.

‘His self-regarding “I” willed himself to become a monster. This detached, external yet internal “I” was both his dramatist and his audience. First, he chose to believe he was possessed by demons. Next, he chose to believe he had become a demon. He even designed himself a costume for the role – those gap-fronted tights! That vest of skin! When he reached a final reconciliation with the projective other who was his self, that icon of his own destructive potential, the abominable black, he had merely perfected that self-regarding diabolism which crushed and flattened the world as he passed through it, like an existential version of the cannibal chief’s chariot. But his insistence on the authority of his own autonomy made him at once the tyrant and the victim of matter, for he was dependent on the notion that matter was submissive to him.

‘So, when he first felt pain, he died of shock. And yet he died a happy man, for those who inflict suffering are always most curious about the nature of suffering.

‘As soon as I took service with him, I realized I must abandon my plan of enlisting him for I soon realized he would never serve any master but himself. However, if he had wanted to, or willed it, he could have flattened my father’s castle by merely breathing on it and burst all the test tubes only with laughing at them. After that, I travelled with him to keep him in a kind of quarantine.’

‘At first, I thought he was your father, the Doctor.’

‘My father?’ she cried in astonishment and laughed very musically for a long time. ‘But at first we thought he was the Minister! Even after I met the Minister, I thought it might be possible. Both of them had such earth-shaking treads.’

‘When did you cease to regard me as an enemy agent?’

‘As soon as my father verified you were in love with me,’ she said, as though it were obvious.

Night had completed itself and lesser lights, eyes of snakes and effluvia of fireflies, spangled the black velvet surfaces around us but the eyes of Albertina shone continually, like unquenchable suns. Her eyes were an unutterably lambent brown and the shape of tears laid on their sides. But shape and colour were not the primary quality of these unprecedented eyes; that was the scandalous cry of passion ringing out clamorously from their depths. Her eyes were the voice of the black swan; her eyes confounded all the senses and sleep nor death cannot silence nor extinguish them. Only, they are lightly veiled with incandescent dust.

During the first part of the night, she slept while I kept watch for wild beasts. She watched over me all the second part of the night and so we continued to arrange our rests during the remainder of the journey though days and nights soon resolved together and we had no notion of how much time had passed, or even if any at all of the cloudy stuff had drifted away before the great rain forests thinned out a little. Then we came to a gentler, more feminine country full of jewelled birds with faces of young girls and oviparous trees, where there was nothing that was not marvellous.

‘Because all this country exists only in Nebulous Time, I haven’t the least idea what might happen,’ she said. ‘Now the Professor and his sets of samples are gone, my father cannot structure anything until he makes new models. And desires must take whatever form they please, for the time being. Who knows what we shall find here?

‘If his experiment is a failure, we shall, of course, find nothing.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because the undifferentiated mass desire was not strong enough to perpetuate its own forms.’ When she saw I did not understand her, she grudgingly amplified: ‘It would mean that the castle is not yet generating enough eroto-energy.’

I did not understand her but I nodded, to save face.

‘Anyway, we must watch the sky by day and keep a fire burning at night and then one day we may make contact with one of my father’s aerial patrols.’

‘Has he extended the boundaries of the war so far?’

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘But he keeps most deserted places under continuous air reconnaissance to discover what, if anything, is peopling the emptiness.’

All this sounded like folie de grandeur to me but I was content to leave my fate in her hands, now that I had found her, and we went on through a dangerous wonderland.

We soon learned to identify the grey-green shrubs we called ‘pain trees’ because of the invisible patches scattered over their leaves and bark that stung us when we touched them and left great areas of scarlet inflammation on our skins that irritated us for a long time. But the trees whose trunks were scaled like fish did not harm us, though they stank horribly when the sun was high, unlike the lucidly fragrant white gardenias that wept such hard tears of perfumed gum that I threaded some of them into a necklace of scented amber and gave it to Albertina. Often we walked through intoxicating odoriferous copses composed only of incense trees and we found ourselves in groves of a strange, tall plant which must have been some variety of cactus for its flesh, though soft and white as snow, was formed all over into round bosses tipped with red knobs. When we put our mouths to these nipples we found ourselves drinking sweet milk and were refreshed. These luscious cacti grew all together in tracts of many hundreds at a time and if the country had shown any signs of being inhabited we would have thought that they were farmed in enormous, free-form fields. But we saw no sign of man at all, though we sometimes found the marks of hoofprints of wild horses.

Creeping along the ground and wreathed around branches was an auriculate morning glory with purple ears where the blossoms should have been and often we heard the singing of flowers we never saw. A certain bush with speckled plumage laid clutches of six or seven small brown eggs at a time, eggs the size of pullet’s eggs, in the sandy hollows at its roots. When the bush was laying, it shuddered and clucked; then sighed. In this forest, it seemed that nature had absolved her creations from an adherence to the formal divisions so biology and botany were quite overthrown and the only animals we saw, green-fleshed, marsupial, one-eyed, crawling things, seemed more an ambulant vegetable than anything else. Roasted on a spit, they tasted like barbecued celery.

As far as I can remember, we had been about three days in this terra nebulosa before we came to the strangest of all the trees. It grew by itself on the crown of a low hill, and though it was firmly rooted into the earth by four, quivering legs and a massive trunk topped with branches resembling those of a European oak sprang from its neck, beneath the trunk and above the legs was the skeleton of a horse with its entrails visible. A green sap pulsed and throbbed through the entrails, emitting as it did so a hum like that of a hive of happy bees. The first evidence of the hand of man we had seen since we entered the forest was pinned to the branches of this equine tree. It was decorated with ornaments of wrought iron which jangled together in the wind; with what seemed to be amulets in the shape of horseshoes; and on a prominent branch, a very large longbow abruptly broken in half. Every available spot on the trunk was crowded with votive tablets and inscriptions carved in a brusque, cuneiform script, and here and there votive nails were hammered in while little switches of horsehair were tied to all the twigs in neat bows. And the springy turf around the tree was deeply crusted with droppings of horses and indented with the marks of hooves.

We stood on the hill beside the buzzing, bi-partite thing, half horse, half tree, and looked down on the lyrical contours of a Theocritan valley that opened out before us in rich, unfenced fields of ripe corn that rippled under the soft wind. Albertina pointed to them at the very same moment I saw the series of magnificent forms break the cover of the wheatfield and come towards us, moving as soundlessly on the green carpet underfoot as horses in a dream, though only their bodies were those of horses for they were centaurs.

There were four of them, one bay, one black, a dappled grey and one all unspotted white, but their imposing torsos were mostly gleaming bronze though it seemed, from a distance, almost as if spiders had woven webs all round their shoulders for they were covered with mazy decorations like hug-me-tights of lace. The hair they all wore falling straight down their backs accorded to their horse-like colouring, russet, black or white, but their features were cast in the sternest, most autocratic mould of pure classicism. Their long noses were so straight you could have rolled a ball of mercury down them and their lips were set in austere, magisterial folds. All were clean shaven. They wore their genitalia set at the base of the belly, as on a man; because they were animals, they were without embarrassment but, because they were also men, even if they did not know it, they were proud. And, as they trotted towards us, their arms folded on their breasts, the light of a setting sun glittered upon them so they looked like Greek masterpieces, born in a time when gods walked among us. However, they did not believe they were gods; they believed they walked a constant tightrope above damnation.

As they came closer, I saw they were entirely naked for what I had taken for clothing was the most intricate tattoo work I have ever seen. These tattoos were designed as a whole and covered the back and both arms down as far as the forearms; and the middle of the chest, the upper abdomen and the throat and face were all left bare on the males though the womenfolk were tattooed all over, even their faces, in order to cause them more suffering, for they believed women were born only to suffer. The colours were most subtly woven together and the palette had the aesthetic advantages of limitation for it consisted of only a bluish black, a light blue and a burning red. The designs were curvilinear, swirling pictures of horse gods and horse demons wreathed in flowers, heads of corn, and stylized representations of the mammiform cacti, worked into the skin in a decorative fashion that recalled pictures in embroidery.

When they reached the hill, they turned their faces towards the tree and three times uttered, in unison, a singularly piercing neigh, while each dropped a turd. Then the bay, in the most thrilling baritone I have ever heard, began a sacerdotal song or hieratic chant something in the style of the chants of orthodox Jewry, though with the addition of a great deal of dramatic mime. It was the hour when the Sacred Stallion in his fiery form, the Sun Horse, entered the Celestial Stable and closed the bars on himself for the night and the bay was giving thanks for the day’s ending, because, in their theology, every event in the physical world depended solely on the ongoing mercy of the Sacred Stallion and on his congregation’s ongoing atonement for the unmentionable sin at the dawn of time that recurred inexorably every year. But I did not know that then. The bay used his voice like a musical instrument and, since I did not understand their language, I thought it was a wordless song. The other centaurs lent their voices at intervals in a magnificently polyphonic counterpoint and also beat their hooves on the turf to provide rhythm. It was stupendously impressive.

When the bay finished, he bowed his head to show his orisons were over. His black mane and tail were grizzled and his face showed the marks of age in a weathering that added to its heroic beauty. Then he spoke to Albertina and myself in a sonorous sequence of deep, rumbling sounds.

But we could not understand a single word and that, I realized when I learned a little of their speech, was because it possessed neither grammar nor vocabulary. It was only a play of sounds. One needed a sharp ear and a keen intuition to make head or tail of it and it seemed to have grown naturally out of the singing of the scriptures, which they held to be vital to their continued existence.

When he saw our perplexity, the bay shrugged and indicated by gesture we should throw down our weapons. When we had done so, he gestured us to mount the dappled grey and the black. I demurred in pantomime, mimicking our unworthiness to ride them and at that he smiled, and told us wordlessly that, even though we were unworthy, we must ride just the same. Only much later, when I learned we had ridden two of the princes of their Church, did I realize how privileged we had been for the black was the Smith and the dappled grey the Scrivener and these were posts the equivalent of cardinals. Each centaur picked one of us up in his brawny arms and swung us up behind him on to his broad back as easily as if we had been children. Although I should not think they had ever carried passengers before, they moved at a stately walk, though less out of consideration for our precarious seats than that they never strolled or ambled but always only processed. We rode through the sea of corn to the cluster of homesteads that lay, half-smothered in vines and flowers, beyond the fields. And there they gently put us down in a kind of agora or meeting place, in the centre of which was a very large wooden rostrum with a brass trumpet hanging from its rail. The bay put his trumpet to his lips and blew.

The centaurs lived in enormous stables fashioned from the trunks of trees, with deep eaves of thatch, a style of architecture with a Virgilian rusticity for it had the severe, meditative quality of classicism and yet was executed in wood and straw. The lofty proportions of these stables were dictated by the size of our hosts; a half-grown centaur, part yearling, part adolescent, was already a whole head taller than I so the doors all had wooden archways more than fifteen feet high and ten feet broad, at least. It was the hour of the evening meal when we arrived and woodsmoke drifted into the fading sky from various holes in the roofs but, as soon as the bay sounded the horn, every inhabitant of the place came trotting from his house until we were surrounded by a throng of the fabulous creatures, inquisitively snuffing the air that blew about us, arching their necks and blowing thoughtfully through their nostrils for, though they were men, they had all the mannerisms of horses.

They thought that, since they had found us on the Holy Hill, we too must be holy in spite of our unprepossessing appearance.

If they had not decided we were holy, they would have trampled us to death.

Though they were men, they did not know what a man was and believed themselves to be a degenerate variety of the horse they worshipped.

Herds of wild horses often came to trample down their plantations of grain and their cacti dairies, to plunge through the townships like a hooved river in full spate and to mount the centaurs’ womenfolk, if they found them. They believed the Sacred Stallion housed the souls of the dead in the wild horses and called their depredations the Visitation of the Spirits. They followed them with weeks of fasting, of the self-mortification to which they were addicted and to the recital of the part of their equine scripture which celebrated the creation of the first principle, the mystic essence of horse, the Sacred Stallion, from a fusion of fire and air in the upper atmosphere. Even before I understood their language, I found myself profoundly moved to hear the impassioned recital of their mythic past, which only the males of a certain caste were allowed to perform. Though they all sang constantly and all their songs were hymns or psalms, sacred narrative poetry was the exclusive property of a single cantor, who to earn the right to sing it had to run with the wild horses for an entire season, an ordeal few candidates for the post survived. Then, when he reached the age of thirty, he began to study the arcane classics under the elder who alone knew them all. By his forty-fifth birthday, he had learned the complete canon and its accompanying gestures and footwork, for this poetry was both sung and danced; then he would present for the first time in public, in the earth-floored agora, the song of the horse who penetrated to the shades to retrieve his dead friend.

They prized fidelity above all other virtues. An unfaithful wife was flayed alive and her hide given to her husband to cover his next marriage bed, a mute deterrent to his new bride to keep from straying, while her lover was castrated and forced to eat his own penis, uncooked. Since they all had the most profound horror of meat, they termed this method of execution ‘Death by Nausea’. However, this rigorous puritanism did not prevent every male in the village from raping Albertina on the night we arrived and their organs were so prodigious, their virility so unmentionable, that she very nearly died. While, as for me, they forced on me the caresses of all their females for they had no notion of humanity in spite of their extraordinary nobility of spirit. Because they were far more magnificent than man, they did not know what a man was. They did not have a word for shame and nothing human was alien to them because they were alien to everything human.

These hippolators believed their god revealed himself to them in the droppings excreted by the horse part of themselves since this manifested the purest essence of their equine natures, and it was quite as logical an idol as a loaf of bread or a glass of wine, though the centaurs had too much good sense to descend to coprophily. The community was governed by a spiritual junta comprising the Cantor, the repository and interpreter of the Gospel; the Scrivener; the Smith; and the Tattoo-master. It went on four legs, as was only natural.

The centaurs did not give one another personal names for they felt themselves all undifferentiated aspects of a universal will to become a horse. So these cardinals were referred to in common speech by the symbols of their arts. The Cantor was called Song, though never to his face; the Tattoo-master Awl, Gouge or Aspiring Line; the Smith Red Hot Nail and the Scrivener, Horse Hair Writing Brush. But this terminology was necessary not because the individuals needed names but because the tasks they performed distinguished them from the others, so that it was not precisely the bay who was known as Song but the idea of the Cantor which he represented. They did not have much everyday social intercourse. The women did not gossip at their work, although they always sang. Daily life was meaningless to them for all they did was done in the shadow of the continuous passion of the Sacred Stallion and only this cosmic drama was real to them. They had no vocabulary to express doubts. Nor were they able to express the notion ‘death’. When the time came to identify this condition, they used for it the sounds that signified also ‘birth’ for death was their greatest mercy. In giving them death, the Sacred Stallion gave them an ultimate reconciliation with Him; they were reborn in the wild horses.

Music was the voice of the Sacred Stallion. Shit signified his presence among them. Their Holy Hill was a dungheap. The twice daily movement of their bowels was at once a form of prayer and a divine communion. Every aspect of their lives was impregnated by the profoundest religious feeling for even the little foal child whose milk teeth were not yet through was a kind of priest, or medium for the spirit, in this faith. But only the males held the secrets of these mysteries. The women were the rank and file of the devotees and had so much to do, working the fields, bearing the children, milking the cacti, making the cheese, grinding the corn, building the houses, they could spare time only to pray, beating staccato patterns of hoof beats and uttering the shrieking neigh that meant: ‘Hallelujah!’ The females were ritually degraded and reviled. They bore the bloody brunt of the tattooing. They dragged whole trunks of trees to build the stables while their menfolk prayed. Yet the women were even more beautiful than the men, each one both Godiva and her mount at the same time. They walked like rivers in floods of variously coloured hair and carried their crimson holes proudly beneath tails that arched like rainbows. It was a heraldic sight to see a pair of centaurs mating.

And now, on our first evening, the setting sun cast a magic aurefaction on their hocks and shoulders and all those profiles off Greek vases and I felt the strange awe I had experienced in the choirs and naves of the forest, for once more we were surrounded by giant and indifferent forms. I felt myself dwindle and diminish. Soon I was nothing but a misshapen doll clumsily balanced on two stunted pins, so ill-designed and badly functioning a puff of wind would knock me over, so graceless I walked as though with an audible grinding of rusty inner gears, so slow of foot our hosts could run me down in a flash for I might even be stupid enough to try to escape. And when I looked at Albertina, I saw that though she was still beautiful, she also had become a doll; a doll of wax, half melted at the lower part.

When the bay spoke to me, I answered him in my own tongue; then French; then the already half-forgotten language of the river people; then my faulty English; then my even scantier German. He rumbled deeply in the back of his throat, possibly in admiration of my facility for making noises, and then Albertina spoke a few phrases in, among other languages I could not even identify, Chinese and Arabic. But the bay shrugged, making a kaleidoscopic confluence of the colours on his shoulders, and, gripping me tightly in his mighty fist, began a mute inspection of me, while the dappled grey investigated Albertina.

They soon discovered that our clothes came off and the sight of these flapping, detachable integuments provoked a sweet thunder of laughter among a breed used to garments embroidered in pain that fitted so intimately they came off only if a back was pared like an apple. Kneeling down in the fashion of horses, the bay and the grey prised, poked and handled every part of our bodies, especially our forked, insubstantial, lower halves, for they had nothing to compare Old Two Legs with. Our feet, especially, were objects of the greatest wonder and, by the sonorous exclamations, clearly also of considerable surmise. When a yearling ran up with an axe, I guessed the bay planned to cut off a foot in order to take it in his hands and examine it more closely. I was interested to see he interpreted my involuntary cry as one of outraged protest and waved the hatchet away. A look of intense curiosity crossed his face while he subjected me to a fresh barrage of incomprehensible questions. But I did not know how to reply except with a few, wordless murmurs because I had not yet grasped the essentially nonverbal nature of the language and he soon abandoned all attempts to talk to me and bent over me afresh to count my toes and exclaim over my toenails, which clearly fascinated him.

As it grew darker, they brought flaming brands set in iron torches to light up the piazza and left us lying on our backs on the stage while the bay conducted vespers. The service consisted of a recital from the scriptures and prayers. The recital of their scriptures in toto occupied the entire year, which concluded with the death and resurrection of the Sacred Stallion at midwinter. Then forty days’ mourning was succeeded by a three-day feast and the entire cycle began again. Now, by one of the temporal metastases which occurred constantly in Nebulous Time, we happened to have fallen into their hands at the very time in which they were living again the season, recurring every year in the timeless medium which regulated all their actions, when the Sacred Stallion from the depths of his compassion teaches them the art of tattooing, so that, though the sins of their father had denied them the true shape of horses, they could at least carry the shapes of horses upon their altered skins. So the lesson for today had the text: TRANSMISSION OF THE DIVINE ART NUMBER ONE. Though this was neither more nor less significant to them than any other phase in their theological dramaturgy, for all were of the utmost significance, it had certain repercussions upon the nature of the hospitality they eventually offered us. For their ritual was by no means inflexible; it could be altered and broadened to incorporate any new element they happened upon. As it incorporated the incursions of the wild horses, so eventually they modulated it in order to incorporate us. But that came later.

By its nature, the TRANSMISSION OF THE DIVINE ART NUMBER ONE was one of the less choreographic of their recitals, though the staging was sufficiently impressive. Nevertheless, it was awesome.

First of all, the assembled women began to beat a subdued rhythm with their hooves and an acolyte, a sorrel-coloured foal, ceremoniously brought on to the stage a wooden tray containing a whip, a paintbrush, a saucer full of black liquid and some kind of metal instrument I could not identify. He knelt before the bay who at first seemed sullen and impassive, adopting a statuesque pose with his arms folded. But, as the drumbeats quickened, he began to sing in that most glorious baritone and in response came the nasalized hallelujah chorus that is my strongest memory of our life among the centaurs for it greeted the dawn and foreclosed the day, every day, inevitably, and is inseparably mingled in my mind with the rich smell of fresh horse-dung.

As the music he and his congregation made grew quicker and louder, the bay’s excitement began to rise. He sought after atonement and he chastised himself. He moaned and grovelled and quarrelled with himself until, seizing the whip, he beat his own flanks until the blood came. When they saw the blood, some of the women went off into strange, lonely ecstasies. Puffs of blue flame came out of their holes and they reared, threshed about with their hooves and whinnied convulsively. But when the Cantor dropped his whip and sank to the ground, covering his face, in an attitude of complete abnegation, everyone grew tremulously silent and I saw that even the grown males were weeping.

Now a second actor entered the spectacle and engaged him in a duet. The white centaur stepped forward. The persistent beat changed to almost a waltz rhythm. The white was a seductive tenor and, though I only understood the meaning through the tones of the sound itself, I knew he was singing of forgiveness and the baritone was beseeching him to be allowed to suffer more. But the mercy of the tenor was inexorable. At last he took from the tray the paintbrush and the metal object, which I saw was some kind of gouge, parted the bay’s tributaries of hair to reveal his back, dipped the brush in the saucer of ink and made a number of obviously highly stylized passes over the exposed flesh of the kneeling bay, who responded by throwing such a contagious ecstasy that he took most of his audience with him and, in a clamour of tears, abandoned laughter and signs everywhere of the most delirious joy, the service ended with an explosive shedding of all the dung in every bowel present, Albertina’s and mine excepted.

After the god had visited them, the women went to fetch brooms and wooden buckets from their stables and swept up all the manure into heaping piles, which they used to fertilize their fields, for they wasted nothing. While the women tidied up by the light of the torches, the Cantor and the Tattoo-master turned their attention back to us. Now they concentrated their fingerings upon our private parts and seemed reassured by the familiar shapes although they were lodged between such unfamiliar legs. The white centaur thoughtfully pushed three fingers bunched together up Albertina’s vagina and listened to her scream judiciously, with his head on one side. He lowered his muzzle and began to sniff her comprehensively. His working nostrils travelled over every inch of her skin and occasionally he licked her, to let his palate verify the evidence collected by his nose. His warm breath and rough tongue tickled her; she began to laugh and, when the bay followed suit and started to snuffle over me, soon I was laughing too, though it was a laughter close to hysteria.

These two elders raised their heads and engaged in a baying colloquy which ended in the following manner. We were both carried bodily to the bay’s stable and laid down on the table from which his wife hastily cleared the supper dishes when they brought us in. The rest of the villagers followed us, so there was a great crowd, every male, female and infant in the village gathered in the enormous room. When I tried to scramble over the great board of oak to reach her and protect her, the bay easily held me down with one hand. His strength was immense. Then the white spread her legs wide and investigated the aperture involuntarily offered him, clearly comparing it with the size of his tumescent organ, which was that of a horse rather than a man. Nevertheless he pulled her down to the edge of the table and in it went, after a hideous struggle.

The audience, rapt with wonderment, neighed softly and pawed the ground and then, one after the other, all the males took their turn at her. She was soon mired with blood but, after the first exclamation, she did not cry again. I struggled and bit the bay but still he would not let me go though he murmured to himself as if surprised to see evidence of a bond between two members of a species that must have seemed to him the lowest form of horse he had ever seen. They were all bathed in ruddy light and the tattoos performed danses macabres across their backs. None of them seemed to extract the least pleasure out of the act. They undertook it grimly, as though it were their duty.

And I could do nothing but watch and suffer with her for I knew from my own experience the pain and indignity of a rape. But the centaurs let me alone in that way, either because my offering was too narrow or else that mode of congress was unknown to them. At the back of my mind flickered a teasing image, that of a young girl trampled by horses. I could not remember when or where I had seen it, such a horrible thing; but it was the most graphic and haunting of memories and a voice in my mind, the cracked, hoarse, drunken voice of the dead peep-show proprietor, told me that I was somehow, all unknowing, the instigator of this horror. My pain and agitation increased beyond all measure.

While the males made this prolonged and terrible assault upon Albertina, the bay was organizing the females into a line and I knew I would not be left out of the savage game. But me they treated with far less severity because they respected the virile principle and reviled the female one. So my torment was intended only to humiliate their own womenfolk who one by one caressed me, as they were ordered, but only with the gentlest of fingers. I was subjected to the ministrations of twenty or thirty of the tenderest, if the most perverse, of mothers and some even bent to kiss me with mouths like wet velvet in faces covered with permanent masks of lace, so I could not help but quicken with pleasure while the bay held me down so firmly I could only moan. And this was the subtlest of tortures – that I was bathed in a series of the most exquisite sensations on the very table where they cruelly abused the flesh of the one I loved best. My nostrils were full of the mingled stench of horses, of the smoke from their pine wood torches, of the perfumed oil with which the women dressed their hair, of blood, of semen and of pain; the very air thickened and grew red. And though Albertina was the object of a rape, the males clearly did not know it was a rape. They showed neither enthusiasm nor gratification. It was only some form of ritual, another invocation of the Sacred Horse.

They had a deeply masochistic streak. They did not reserve the whip only for religion but used it continually on themselves and one another, making the slightest real or imagined fault the pretext for a beating. It was a matter of pride as to how thin one could bear one’s bed of straw. They loved to feel the hot steel on their fetlocks when the priest shod them, for the Sacred Horse had taught them the art of the smith and if he had ordained them bits and bridles stuck with inward-turning spikes, they would have donned them luxuriously. The centaurs had all the virtues and defects of a heroic style.

The bay serviced Albertina last of all, while the white Tattoo-master took a turn at holding me down. Of all the rapists, the bay was most impassive. Then, in silence, they dispersed to their homes and the stable was empty but for the family of the bay.

The bay’s mate, a Junoesque roan mare, put a great cauldron of water to heat on a hook over the fire and I wondered if they were going to end the evening by boiling us alive. But the bay snorted, wiped himself down with a wisp of hay, took a leather-bound book from a high shelf and sat down before the fire. The three children – a male of perhaps twelve by human reckoning, as yet unshod; a female of about fifteen, part wood nymph and part Palomino; and a foal baby who hardly knew, yet, how to tumble about on her four legs, lined up in front of him and all went down on their front legs. And then he began to hear their catechism.

The girl-female was already completely sheathed with a pattern of horses and grapes that made her look as if she were peering through a vineyard but the artist had only just begun to work on the boy and nothing more than the centrepiece of a full design, a rampant stallion, was traced in outline on his skin. He went to the Tattoo-master every morning after prayers and a little more was filled in every day so that, under our eyes, the living picture was to grow more and more emphatic the longer we lived there and we could mark the passage of time by the creeping tendrils of the work on his back. Their father asked the questions and the children made the ritual responses; they seemed to have forgotten us and I crawled across the table top to Albertina. She had lost consciousness. I took her in my arms and buried my face in her forlorn hair.

The proportions of the stable and of the beings who lived there were only just a little larger than those suited to a man but the slightness of the excessive size of everything together with the superhuman strength and flawless gravity of our hosts or captors made me feel like a child at the mercy of uncomprehending adults rather than of ogres. Even the rape had had elements of the kind of punishment said to hurt the giver more than the receiver though I do not know what they were punishing her for, unless it was for being female to a degree unprecedented among them. Now, when the roan mare looked up from tending the fire and saw me grieving over my fainting lover, she did not change mood so much as allow her essential motherliness to intensify. She came and looked at Albertina and then she spoke some low, submissive but reproachful words to her master and stroked Albertina’s face with a piteous hand. I think she had meant to wash the table top with the water she was heating, for the table was now very dirty and her house was very clean, but instead she took the pan off the hook and invited me to clamber in and wash myself while she herself made a soft pad of hay, moistened it and gently wiped the blood and muck from Albertina. The centaur’s saucepan made me a snugly fitting hip bath and, when I had finished, she indicated I should sit in front of the fire and dry myself while she put Albertina to bed on the straw but I saw Albertina’s eyelids flutter and went to her at once.

Again the mare spoke to her husband and then to me, with the intonation of a question. I thought she must be asking me if Albertina was my mate so I repeated the sound she had made back to her in a strongly affirmative tone. She looked exceedingly surprised; and then she smiled most tenderly and let us both lie down together while she covered us up with straw and the catechism droned softly on.

The mare must have talked to her husband during the night because he came to our bed in the morning, abased himself and kissed my feet because she was my mate, therefore my property, and so he must apologize to me. Tears ran out of his eyes. He whipped himself for me. Then he went out to conduct morning service and after that I ate my breakfast with the family, sitting on a stump of wood his wife found for me while the males all sat on their haunches and ate with their hands from wooden dishes like sylvan men and the women waited until the men had finished before they took their own meal. But Albertina could not stir from her bed and only feebly sipped a mouthful or two of the milk I tried to feed her.

Their diet was one of rustic simplicity. The women ground their corn in stone querns and made flat, tortilla-like pancakes which they ate with the wild honey in which they also deliciously preserved fruit. They sometimes roasted the ears of corn on the hot coals. Morning and evening, they milked the cactuses into wooden buckets, fermented the milk to make a sour but invigorating drink and also made flat, white cheeses with a sweet, bland flavour and a crumbling texture. They cultivated orchards of fruit and vegetable gardens of roots and tubers; they gathered salads in the forests and also mushrooms, which they particularly liked to eat raw, dressed with oil and vinegar. They made sweet syrup from berries but the Sacred Horse had not revealed to them the mysteries of alcohol so their religion was only a spartan, teetotal variation upon Dionysianism and their grapes went only into jellies and salad dressings. Their abstemious, vegetarian diet filled them out with iron muscle. Their teeth were white and perfect. They died only of accident and old age and old age took a long time to come to them.

But their lives were only apparently tranquil. Every day of the week and every week of the year was irradiated by the continuous divine drama unfolding in the voices of the singers and the turning of the year so they lived primarily on dramaturgical terms. This gave the women a certain dignity that would otherwise have been denied them for every one of the most insignificant household tasks, mucking out, bringing water from the spring, picking the lice from one another’s manes and tails, was performed as if in a divine theatre, as if, for example, each mare was the embodiment of the archetypal Bridal Mare as she cleaned the Celestial Stable; even if the Bridal Mare was only a penitent sinner, still she was essential to the Sacred Horse’s passion.

Therefore, every minute of the day, they were all, male and female alike, engrossed in weaving and embroidering the rich fabric of the very world in which they lived and, like so many Penelopes, their work was never finished. The whole point of their activity was that it was endless, for they unravelled their work at the end of the year and then, with the return of the sun after the shortest day, began on it again. The horse-tree on the Holy Hill was the central node of their world, for it was the living skeleton of the Sacred Stallion left them as an authoritarian reminder by the deity himself; their conduct was regulated by the tree’s responses to the seasons and the Sacred Stallion died when the leaves fell. Yet, for all its sanctity, the tree was really no more than a kind of anthropoid vegetable clock, for it only told them when it was proper to perform certain choric cantatas. For, as I say, their drama was comprehensive enough to be extremely flexible and if the tree had been blasted one night by lightning the Church of the Horse would have absorbed this event into a new mutation of the central myth, after a period of spiritual reorientation.

They were not fabulous beasts; they were entirely mythic. Sometimes I thought they were not really centaurs at all but only men who possessed such a deep conviction the universe was a horse that it was impossible for them to see any evidence that hinted things might be otherwise.

Their language was far simpler than it seemed at first. It consisted primarily of sound clusters and intuition and, though it was quite different from any human language, it was easy enough for a man to grasp and before three weeks passed both Albertina and I had enough of the rudiments to make simple conversation with our hosts and so learn something of the consternation into which our arrival had plunged them. We had disrupted their cycle and they were still going through a painful period of readjustment. They had searched all through their holy books and found there no formulas of hospitality. We were the first visitors they had ever had in their entire legendary history and when we learned to say their equivalent of ‘good morning’, their consternation reached a giddy height for there was no sound in their language with which to define a sentient, communicable being who was not mostly horse.

But, since they had found us on the Holy Hill, they knew we were a sign from heaven though they had not yet decided just what it was we signified. While they racked their brains over the problem, they took certain hygienic precautions. They would not let us go and watch their matins and their evensong and they never left us entirely alone together, for fear we might propagate other as yet indigestible marvels before they could find a means of digesting us. Apart from that, they treated us kindly and, after I received permission from the bay to browse among his books, I soon filled my days by turning my old talents at the crossword puzzle to solving the riddle of their runes.

Poor Albertina took a long time to recover from her ordeal. The roan mare and I looked after her and fed her warm milk mixed with honey and a rich porridge made from corn, kept her warm and attended to everything but her fever did not leave her for three days and she could hardly walk but only hobble for more than a fortnight. She was brave and soon stopped flinching when she saw the bay while the children shyly brought her wild strawberries arranged on platters of fresh leaves or bunches of the poppies and moon daisies that grew in the corn, because she was so holy. I sat beside Albertina with my books as the roan mare did the housework and Albertina told me, in the way of those who are sick far from home, of her childhood in Hoffman’s Schloss, of her rarely seen father, who had seemed so formidable to the little Albertina, of the frail mother with bridled eyes who died so soon and of certain pet rabbits, birds and other playthings. She did not speak of the war or of her father’s researches; she seemed content to rest for a while and gather her strength. She begged me to watch for the aerial patrols and so I went up to the Holy Hill every morning and scanned the sky; though I always saw only clouds and birds, she never gave up hope but said: ‘Perhaps, tomorrow…’ My trips to the hill only helped confirm our host’s theory that we must be numinous.

The more I was beside her, the more I loved her.

At last I began to gain some glimmerings of the centaurs’ cosmogony.

The Books of the Sacred Stallion were painted with the brushes they used in the tattooing operation on a kind of parchment made from the barks of certain trees characterized by a leaf formation like a horse’s tail, for they believed in an elaborate system of correspondence. Their cuneiform script was based on the marks of their own hooves and, though all the men could read, only the Scrivener was allowed to practise the art of writing. It was hermetic knowledge and handed down only from eldest son to eldest son. When the Scrivener’s wife bore him no sons, they considered the sequential inheritance so important he was permitted to put his old wife away and take a new one, the only circumstances in which they allowed divorce. But the script was simplicity itself; it was a system of marks corresponding in size exactly to sounds and, after a few lessons from the astonished bay, I was soon able to figure it out well enough.

They called themselves the Distorted Seed of the Dark Archer, although this name was so terrible it could not be spoken aloud, only whispered from one cantor to his successor during the course of his three-week-long initiation. It was an awareness of imminent damnation that kept them at their devotions with such fervour and the mark of Cain they printed upon their backs. It was clearly a matter of pride with them to grow as glorious in their mutilations as they possibly could. And all this was the brooding counterpoint, unspoken yet known, that lent such passion to their worship.

I sheared the thick flesh of rhetoric from the contents, ignored the stories of lesser heroes and was left with this skeleton: the Bridal Mare marries the Sacred Stallion, who instantly impregnates her but, while in foal, she deceives him with a former suitor, the Dark Archer. Spurred by jealousy, the Dark Archer shoots the Sacred Stallion in the eye with an arrow. As he dies, the Sacred Stallion tells the Dark Archer his children will be born in degenerate forms. The Dark Archer and the Bridal Mare cook and eat the Sacred Stallion to hide their crime, but a desolation immediately comes upon the country and, repentant, they whip themselves ferociously for thirty-nine days. (This corresponded to the fast at midwinter and must have been truly astonishing to watch; but we did not stay among them long enough to have the chance of seeing it.) On the fortieth day, the Mare, in a uroboric parturition, gives birth, with extraordinary suffering, to none other than the Sacred Stallion himself, who ascends into the Celestial Stable in the shape of his own foal. The remainder of the liturgical year was taken up with lengthy and overbearing forgiveness and his many teachings – of the art of singing; of the techniques of the smithy; of corn growing; of cactus culture; of cheese-making; and of writing – and all the almost countless ways in which they must conduct their lives in order to atone for their sins. And then, matured, the Sacred Stallion descends from the sky and once again marries the Bridal Mare.

So that was why they held women in such low esteem! And why they would not touch meat! And why they hung a broken bow on the horse-tree! And now I understood they were not so much weaving a fabric of ritual with which to cover themselves but using the tools of ritual to shore up the very walls of the world.

Albertina was as concerned as I with the texture of the life of our hosts but not from any simple, childish curiosity such as mine. She had become engrossed in the problem of the reality status of the centaurs and the more she talked of it, the more I admired her ruthless empiricism for she was convinced that even though every male in the village had obtained carnal knowledge of her, the beasts were still only emanations of her own desires, dredged up and objectively reified from the dark abysses of the unconscious. And she told me that, according to her father’s theory, all the subjects and objects we had encountered in the loose grammar of Nebulous Time were derived from a similar source – my desires; or hers; or the Count’s. At first, especially, the Count’s, for he had lived on closer terms with his own unconscious than we. But now our desires, perhaps, had achieved their day of independence.

I remembered the words of another German savant and quoted to her: ‘ “In the unconscious, nothing can be treated or destroyed.”^* Yet we saw the Count destroyed; and I myself destroyed the Cannibal Chief.’

‘Destruction is only another aspect of being,’ she said categorically and with that I had to be content.

Yet we ate the bread of the centaurs and were nourished by it. So I saw that, if what she believed were so, these phantoms were not in the least insignificant for the existence of the methodical actuality on whose beds of straw we slept, whose language we were forced to learn, this complex reality with its fires, it cheeses, its complicated theology and its magnificent handwriting, this concrete, authentic, self-consistent world was begotten from phenomenal dynamics alone, the product of a random becoming, the first of the wonderful flowers that would bloom in the earth her father had prepared for them by means she, as yet, refused to so much as hint at, except to say they had to do with desire, and radiant energy, and persistence of vision. We were living, then, according to the self-determined laws of a group of synthetically authentic phenomena.

Because they did not have a word for ‘guest’, or even for ‘visitor’, they began to treat us, at last, with a nervous compassion but until they expanded their liturgy to absorb us we were at best irritating irrelevancies, distracting them from the majestic pageant of their ritual lives. We did not even have anything to teach them. They knew all they needed to know and when I tried to tell the bay that by far the greater number of social institutions in the world were made by weak, two-legged, thin-skinned creatures much the same as Albertina and I, he told me in so many words that I was lying. For, because they were men, they had many words to describe conditions of deceit; they were not Houyhnhnms.

When we could speak the language fluently and Albertina had quite recovered, they put her to work in the fields with the women, because it was harvest time. The women reaped the corn and brought it into the village in sheaves on their backs. When all was gathered in, they would thresh it during the performance of semi-secular harvest songs on a communal threshing floor. Soon Albertina became as brown as an Indian, for the yellowish pigment of her Mongolian skin took to sunshine in as friendly a fashion as my own did. She would come home in the golden evenings, wreathed with corn like a pagan deity in a pastoral and naked as a stone, for they did not give us back our clothes and we never needed to cover ourselves, for the weather was always warm. But even when all her wounds were healed, she would not let me touch her, though she would not tell me why except to say that the time was not yet ripe. So we lived like loving brother and sister, even if I was always a little in awe of her for sometimes her eyes held a dark, blasting lightning and her face fell into the carven lines of the statue of a philosopher. At these times a sense of her difference almost withered me for she was the sole heir to her father’s kingdom and that kingdom was the world. And I had nothing. Familiarity did not diminish her strangeness nor her magnetism. Every day I found her all the more miraculous and I would gaze at her for hours together, as though I were feeding on her eyes. And, as I remember, she, too, would gaze at me.

But we were prisoners of the centaurs and did not know if we would ever be free, unless her father’s aerial patrols sighted us.

Because I was male, they did not let me do any work and seemed happy enough to let me wander around the village, learning what I could learn. Perhaps they even thought, when they saw me poring over their books, they might even be able to enlist me in their ceremonies, one day, as an inkbearer or an assistant fustigator. I do not know. But I do know they were making their plans for us. When the Cantor, the Tattoo-master, the Smith and the Scrivener talked together, they always talked in whispers. But now they met together more and more frequently; they were always at their whisperings. And the Scrivener, with a choir around him, chanting, would sit at the table in his stable and write in a new big book in the evenings.

When I went to watch the tattooing, I found the art was as remarkable as the method was atrocious. First, they chose a design from the pictures in the ancient volumes of blueprints and drew it on the skin with the brush. But then the pain began for the artist did not use a relatively humane needle; he kept in a consecrated chest his artillery of triangular-shaped awls and gouges. He ground and mixed his pigments himself. He and his sons, his apprentices, went into the forest to search for the ingredients for their mixes and the colours, taken from minerals in the earth and dried, powdered plants, were often toxic enough to produce an effect as of scalding, and always a terrible itching, although the skin of the man-parts was far tougher than human skin. So one often saw young boys feverishly scratching their half-embroidered backs against rough trunks of trees in the mornings after their visits to the master. During a tattooing, the Tattoo-master’s stable was halfway between an operating theatre and a chapel.

His wife scrubbed down the table and set out a pillow of straw on which the boy victim rested his head as he lay face down while the master’s three sons lined up, chanting, one carrying the awls, another the paint and the third a bowl of water and a sponge. The Cantor, at the head of the table, began to sing; he sang the sympathetic magic of the emblem, how he who wore the horse indented on his skin took on the virtue of horses while the master plunged the brush in the ink with his left hand and, taking in the other an awl or gouge, depending on the thickness of the desired line, he rubbed the instrument in the wet brush and pushed the colouring matter under the skin. And then the third son wiped the blood away with a sponge. Each of the children’s visits lasted an hour. The Tattoo-master always had a full day’s work. The more complicated designs, those for the children of the church dignitaries, could take up to a year to complete and the women, especially, suffered terribly in the regions around their nipples. And all the time they suffered, the song went on; religion was their only analgesic.

Work on the tattoo of the bay’s son was almost complete. Only another few hours’ work and he would become a work of religious art as preposterous as it was magnificent. But we never saw him in his final, ridiculous splendour for one day at breakfast the bay said to me:

‘She is not to go to the fields today. I shall come for both of you after prayers and you will go to the Holy Hill with me.’

He smiled grimly and with even a certain affection, or, rather, with a tolerant acquiescence in my presence at his breakfast table when I could not even sit down decently on all fours, and at Albertina’s presence as she waited quietly with his mate and daughter for her own share of the meal.

We did not have the least idea what would happen to us on the Holy Hill for we were in Nebulous Time. All we could do was help the roan mare clean the wooden platters and wait for his return. I knew from my studies of their books no special ritual was scheduled for today. We were in the time of TRANSMISSION OF DIVINE KNOWLEDGE NO. TWO and that was concerned with the art of the Smith. Yet, foolishly, I felt no suspicion. When they saw how badly the rape had injured Albertina, they had realized we were both more delicately put together than they and treated us, physically, with the greatest respect. Yet I do not think they even understood quite how feeble we were. It was impossible for them to do so. And, like all grown ups, they were quite sure they always knew what was best.

Yet I felt the first misgivings when I saw a solemn procession line up before the bay’s stable and the Cantor lead them all in a song I had never heard before.

It was plainly an unusual day for none of the women had gone to the field. Even the Tattoo-master had left his table to take a prominent place in the procession with his sons ranked behind him and the soot-stained Smith, the black, had abandoned his forge while the dapple grey Scrivener stood at the head of them all and his son ceremoniously carried the suspiciously new book on which he had been working. Perhaps it was a holiday, for all the women were carrying picnic baskets; but they did not have a word for ‘holidays’. And then the bay took Albertina and me one by each hand and so we went out of the village and all the time he sang a new song called: CONSECRATION OF A NEWLY DISCOVERED BOOK OF THE SCRIPTURES.

A light mist lay over the fields that morning, so we could see no further than the golden tassels of ripe corn that brushed us as we passed, and hear nothing besides the bay’s mahogany coloured baritone but the soft, regimented clop of their hoofbeats on the rutted path. Because it was Nebulous Time, one could have imagined it the dawn of time, the anteriority of all times, since Nebulous Time was the womb of time. For the first time, led like a child by the great bay whose form was so much nobler than mine and whose sense of the coherence of his universe was so inflexible, my own conviction that I was a man named Desiderio, born in a certain city, the child of a certain mother, lover of a certain woman, began to waver. If I was a man, what was a man? The bay offered me a logical definition: a horse in a state of ultimate, biped, maneless, tailless decadence. I was a naked, stunted, deformed dwarf who one day might begin to forget what purpose such a thing as a name of my own served. And the brown thing with breasts who held the bay’s other hand was my mate. From the waist upwards, she was passable, if ugly because not equine; but, from the waist down, vile. And, besides, she was incomplete because there were none of the necessary scars on her skin. How naked we were! I had begun to think of the centaurs as our masters, you see, although Albertina had warned me: ‘The pressures of Nebulous Time alone force them to live with such certitude!’ And perhaps I was indeed looking for a master – perhaps the whole history of my adventure could be titled ‘Desiderio in Search of a Master’. But I only wanted to find a master, the Minister, the Count, the bay, so that I could lean on him at first and then, after a while, jeer.

If Albertina had known how despicable I was, she would not have given me a second thought.

When we came to the Holy Hill, they all neighed ‘Hallelujah!’ and evacuated. Then they spread down straw they had brought with them under the tree so that we should not have to lie down in horse dung when they laid us down. The Scrivener nailed the new book to the tree. The prayers were interminable. The Tattoo-master and the Cantor performed an endless cantata for tenor and baritone while the three boys who bore the instruments of torture waited with the blind indifference of trees.

As I listened to the singing, I learned from the text how the master I longed for proposed to treat us.

We would be tattooed upon the Holy Hill where the Sacred Stallion had first set us down. He had sent us into the world to show his flock what fearful shapes they might all still come to if they did not adhere even more strictly than before to his dogmas. But, in his infinite compassion, the Stallion had decided to integrate us with the celestial herd. They would paint us with his picture and then, to make us resemble him even more, they would nail the iron shoes on our feet with red hot nails. After that, they would take us into the forest and give us to the Spirits. That is, the wild horses, who would certainly trample us to death.

Red Hot Nail in person threw back his mane and neighed. We heard every word. I turned my head a little and saw she was crying. I stretched out my hand towards her and grasped it. Whatever the reality status of the centaurs, they certainly had the power to deprive us forever of any reality at all for it was certain we would die together, if not from the first sacrament, then from the second, and, if we managed to survive that, the third would certainly end us. I felt a certain clarity and composure, for matters were quite out of our control; if we were the victims of unleashed, unknown desires, then die we must, for as long as those desires existed, we would finish by killing one another.

Yes. I thought so, even then.

The Tattoo-master knelt and took the brush. She shivered when she felt the chill, wet tongue of horsehair lick along her spine and I held her hand more tightly. The congregation drummed their hooves. The Cantor chanted and mimed, I think, the DANCE OF THE HORSEHAIR WRITING BRUSH. I do not know how long it took before her back was painted over completely; I do not know how long it took to paint me but when we were both finished, they stopped the ceremony to eat their lunches and brought us some milk and cold pancakes, too, though they would not let us get up because the paint was not yet dry. When the brief meal was over, our ordeal would begin in earnest. She trembled and I remembered how she had looked when she was Lafleur. And yet I knew she was far braver than I.

It was late morning and the sun was shining very brightly. The morning mist had dried and the sky was amazingly clear and blue. She raised herself up on her elbows as high as she could, and, shading her eyes with her hands, she gazed into the far distance. Again, I remembered Lafleur looking for a storm, although I knew she was searching for her father’s aerial patrols. However, I did not believe in the patrols. Yet, as she trembled, I saw it was not with fear but with hope – or, perhaps, a kind of effortful strain; she gripped my hand more tightly, until her nails dug into my palm. I remembered the scrap of paper in the pocket of the peep-show proprietor’s nephew. ‘My desires, concentrated to a single point…’

I am sure what happened next was coincidence. I am positive of that. I would stake my life on it.

‘Look!’ she hissed on a triumphantly expelled breath.

In the far distance, the sunlight glinted on the wings of a metal bird.

But that was not the most remarkable thing; that was not the extraordinary coincidence. The litany began again and the Cantor threw almost on top of us an ecstasy so wonderful I could not see anything but his flailing hooves and sweat-drenched loins whirling above me. His consummation laid him low; he sprawled on the ground, kicking his hooves spasmodically, and in the tremendous silence I heard the whirring of an engine, but either they were too transfigured to hear it or they thought it was the sound of a clattering insect in the corn. And, yes, the sap in the horse-tree went on busily buzzing. Then came the sacerdotal moment. The Awl raised the brush and the piercing instrument. And this was the coincidence. At the very moment he bent down to make the first incision, the buzzing horse-tree went up in flames.

‘… ignite all in their way.’

The Scrivener might have written a new book but it did not allow for so much improvisation. Besides, now the book was burning. The dried dung at the roots of the tree caught almost instantaneously and a lasso of flame captured the bay’s tail. He thrashed his sparking torch this way and that way, howling, and he dropped dung not in prayer, but this time in fear. The Tattoo-master turned into a horse of ivory and flame and suddenly they were all on fire, all the priests around us and our bed of straw was blazing, too. But Albertina and I sprang out and through the wall of fire to run as fast as we could through the whinnying havoc to the helicopter that had landed in the corn field.