The voice said: take this horrible sight away, where I need never see it again.
Popolac turned away into the hills, its legs taking strides half a mile long. Each man, woman and child in that seething tower was sightless. They saw only through the eyes of the city. They were thoughtless, but to think the city's thoughts. And they believed themselves deathless, in their lumbering, relentless strength. Vast and mad and deathless.
Two miles along the road Mick and Judd smelt petrol in the air, and a little further along they came upon the VW. It had overturned in the reed-clogged drainage ditch at the side of the road. It had not caught fire. The driver's door was open, and the body of Vaslav Jelovsek had tumbled out. His face was calm in unconsciousness. There seemed to be no sign of injury, except for a small cut or two on his sober face. They gently pulled the thief out of the wreckage and up out of the filth of the ditch on to the road. He moaned a little as they fussed about him, rolling Mick's sweater up to pillow his head and removing the man's jacket and tie. Quite suddenly, he opened his eyes.
He stared at them both.
"Are you all right?" Mick asked.
The man said nothing for a moment. He seemed not to understand.
Then: "English?" he said. His accent was thick, but the question was quite clear.
"Yes."
"I heard your voices. English."
He frowned and winced.
"Are you in pain?" said Judd.
The man seemed to find this amusing.
"Am I in pain?" he repeated, his face screwed up in a mixture of agony and delight.
"I shall die," he said, through gritted teeth.
"No," said Mick, “you're all right -”
The man shook his head, his authority absolute.
"I shall die," he said again, the voice full of determination, "I want to die."
Judd crouched closer to him. His voice was weaker by the moment.
"Tell us what to do," he said. The man had closed his eyes. Judd shook him awake, roughly. "Tell us," he said again, his show of compassion rapidly disappearing. "Tell us what this is all about." "About?" said the man, his eyes still closed. "It was a fall, that's all. Just a fall…"
"What fell?"
"The city. Podujevo. My city."
"What did it fall from?"
"Itself, of course."
The man was explaining nothing; just answering one riddle with another.
"Where were you going?" Mick inquired, trying to sound as unagressive as possible.
"After Popolac," said the man.
"Popolac?" said Judd.
Mick began to see some sense in the story.
"Popolac is another city. Like Podujevo. Twin cities. They're on the map -”
"Where's the city now?" said Judd.
Vaslav Jelovsek seemed to choose to tell the truth. There was a moment when he hovered between dying with a riddle on his lips, and living long enough to unburden his story. What did it matter if the tale was told now? There could never be another contest: all that was over.
"They came to fight," he said, his voice now very soft, "Popolac and Podujevo. They come every ten years -” "Fight?" said Judd. "You mean all those people were slaughtered?"
Vaslav shook his head.
"No, no. They fell. I told you."
"Well, how do they fight?" Mick said.
"Go into the hills," was the only reply.
Vaslav opened his eyes a little. The faces that loomed over him were exhausted and sick. They had suffered, these innocents. They deserved some explanation.
"As giants," he said. "They fought as giants. They made a body out of their bodies, do you understand? The frame, the muscles, the bone, the eyes, nose, teeth all made of men and women."
"He's delirious," said Judd.
"You go into the hills," the man repeated. "See for yourselves how true it is."
"Even supposing -” Mick began.
Vaslav interrupted him, eager to be finished. "They were good at the game of giants. It took many centuries of practice: every ten years making the figure larger and larger. One always ambitious to be larger than the other. Ropes to tie them all together, flawlessly. Sinews… ligaments… There was food in its belly… there were pipes from the loins, to take away the waste. The best-sighted sat in the eye-sockets, the best voiced in the mouth and throat. You wouldn't believe the engineering of it."
"I don't," said Judd, and stood up.
"It is the body of the state," said Vaslav, so softly his voice was barely above a whisper, “it is the shape of our lives." There was a silence. Small clouds passed over the road, soundlessly shedding their mass to the air. "It was a miracle," he said. It was as if he realized the true enormity of the fact for the first time. "It was a miracle." It was enough. Yes. It was quite enough.
His mouth closed, the words said, and he died.
Mick felt this death more acutely than the thousands they had fled from; or rather this death was the key to unlock the anguish he felt for them all.
Whether the man had chosen to tell a fantastic lie as he died, or whether this story was in some way true, Mick felt useless in the face of it. His imagination was too narrow to encompass the idea. His brain ached with the thought of it, and his compassion cracked under the weight of misery he felt.
They stood on the road, while the clouds scudded by, their vague, grey shadows passing over them towards the enigmatic hills.
It was twilight.
Popolac could stride no further. It felt exhaustion in every muscle. Here and there in its huge anatomy deaths had occurred; but there was no grieving in the city for its deceased cells. If the dead were in the interior, the corpses were allowed to hang from their harnesses. If they formed the skin of the city they were unbuckled from their positions and released, to plunge into the forest below.
The giant was not capable of pity. It had no ambition but to continue until it ceased.
As the sun slunk out of sight Popolac rested, sitting on a small hillock, nursing its huge head in its huge hands. The stars were coming out, with their familiar caution. Night was approaching, mercifully bandaging up the wounds of the day, blinding eyes that had seen too much.
Popolac rose to its feet again, and began to move, step by booming step. It would not be long surely, before fatigue overcame it: before it could lie down in the tomb of some lost valley and die.
But for a space yet it must walk on, each step more agonizingly slow than the last, while the night bloomed black around its head.
Mick wanted to bury the car-thief, somewhere on the edge of the forest. Judd, however, pointed out that burying a body might seem, in tomorrow's saner light, a little suspicious. And besides, wasn't it absurd to concern themselves with one corpse when there were literally thousands of them lying a few miles from where they stood? The body was left to lie, therefore, and the car to sink deeper into the ditch.
They began to walk again.
It was cold, and colder by the moment, and they were hungry. But the few houses they passed were all deserted, locked and shuttered, every one.
"What did he mean?" said Mick, as they stood looking at another locked door.
"He was talking metaphor -” "All that stuff about giants?"
"It was some Trotskyist tripe -” Judd insisted.
"I don't think so."
"I know so. It was his deathbed speech, he'd probably been preparing for years."
"I don't think so," Mick said again, and began walking back towards the road.
"Oh, how's that?" Judd was at his back.
"He wasn't toeing some party line."
"Are you saying you think there's some giant around here someplace? For God's sake!"
Mick turned to Judd. His face was difficult to see the twilight. But his voice was sober with belief. "Yes. I think he was telling the truth."
"That's absurd. That's ridiculous. No."
Judd hated Mick that moment. Hated his naivetй, his passion to believe any half-witted story if it
had a whiff of romance about it. And this? This was the worst, the most preposterous.
"No," he said again. "No. No. No."
The sky was porcelain smooth, and the outline of the hills black as pitch.
"I'm fucking freezing," said Mick out of the ink. "Are you staying here or walking with me?"
Judd shouted: "We're not going to find anything this way."
"Well it's a long way back."
"We're just going deeper into the hills."
"Do what you like – I'm walking."
His footsteps receded: the dark encased him. After a minute, Judd followed. The night was cloudless and bitter. They walked on, their collars up against the chill, their feet swollen in their shoes. Above them the whole sky had become a parade of stars. A triumph of spilled light, from which the eye could make as many patterns as it had patience for. After a while, they slung their tired arms around each other, for comfort and warmth.
About eleven o'clock, they saw the glow of a window in the distance.
The woman at the door of the stone cottage didn't smile, but she understood their condition, and let them in. There seemed to be no purpose in trying to explain to either the woman or her crippled husband what they had seen. The cottage had no telephone, and there was no sign of a vehicle, so even had they found some way to express themselves, nothing could be done.
With mimes and face-pullings they explained that they were hungry and exhausted. They tried further to explain they were lost, cursing themselves for leaving their phrase-book in the VW. She didn't seem to understand very much of what they said, but sat them down beside a blazing fire and put a pan of food on the stove to heat. They ate thick unsalted pea soup and eggs, and occasionally smiled their thanks at the woman. Her husband sat beside the fire, making no attempt to talk, or even look at the visitors.
The food was good. It buoyed their spirits.
They would sleep until morning and then begin the long trek back. By dawn the bodies in the field would be being quantified, identified, parceled up and dispatched to their families. The air would be full of reassuring noises, cancelling out the moans that still rang in their ears. There would be helicopters, lorry loads of men organizing the clearing-up operations. All the rites and paraphernalia of a civilized disaster.
And in a while, it would be palatable. It would become part of their history: a tragedy, of course, but one they could explain, classify and learn to live with. All would be well, yes, all would be well. Come morning. The sleep of sheer fatigue came on them suddenly. They lay where they had fallen, still sitting at the table, their heads on their crossed arms. A litter of empty bowls and bread crusts surrounded them.
They knew nothing. Dreamt nothing. Felt nothing.
Then the thunder began.
In the earth, in the deep earth, a rhythmical tread, as of a titan, that came, by degrees, closer and closer. The woman woke her husband. She blew out the lamp and went to the door. The night sky was luminous with stars: the hills black on every side.
The thunder still sounded: a full half minute between every boom, but louder now. And louder with every new step. They stood at the door together, husband and wife, and listened to the night-hills echo back and forth with the sound. There was no lightning to accompany the thunder.
Just the boom – Boom – Boom – It made the ground shake: it threw dust down from the door-lintel, and rattled the window-latches.
Boom – Boom – They didn't know what approached, but whatever shape it took, and whatever it intended, there seemed no sense in running from it. Where they stood, in the pitiful shelter of their cottage, was as safe as any nook of the forest. How could they choose, out of a hundred thousand trees, which would be standing when the thunder had passed? Better to wait: and watch.
The wife's eyes were not good, and she doubted what she saw when the blackness of the hill changed shape and reared up to block the stars. But her husband had seen it too: the unimaginably huge head, vaster in the deceiving darkness, looming up and up, dwarfing the hills themselves with its ambition.
He fell to his knees, babbling a prayer, his arthritic legs twisted beneath him.
His wife screamed: no words she knew could keep this monster at bay – no prayer, no plea, had power over it. In the cottage, Mick woke and his outstretched arm, twitching with a sudden cramp, wiped the plate and the lamp off the table.
They smashed.
Judd woke.
The screaming outside had stopped. The woman had disappeared from the doorway into the forest. Any tree, any tree at all, was better than this sight. Her husband still let a string of prayers dribble from his slack mouth, as the great leg of the giant rose to take another step -Boom -The cottage shook. Plates danced and smashed off the dresser. A clay pipe rolled from the mantelpiece and shattered in the ashes of the hearth.
The lovers knew the noise that sounded in their substance: that earth-thunder.
Mick reached for Judd, and took him by the shoulder.
"You see," he said, his teeth blue-grey in the darkness of the cottage. "See? See?"
There was a kind of hysteria bubbling behind his words. He ran to the door, stumbling over a chair in the dark. Cursing and bruised he staggered out into the night -Boom -The thunder was deafening. This time it broke all the windows in the cottage. In the bedroom one of the roof-joists cracked and flung debris downstairs. Judd joined his lover at the door. The old man was now face down on the ground, his sick and swollen fingers curled, his begging lips pressed to the damp soil.
Mick was looking up, towards the sky. Judd followed his gaze.
There was a place that showed no stars. It was a darkness in the shape of a man, a vast, broad human frame, a colossus that soared up to meet heaven. It was not quite a perfect giant. Its outline was not tidy; it seethed and swarmed.
He seemed broader too, this giant, than any real man. His legs were abnormally thick and stumpy, and his arms were not long. The hands, as they clenched and unclenched, seemed oddly-jointed and over-delicate for its torso. Then it raised one huge, flat foot and placed it on the earth, taking a stride towards them.
Boom -The step brought the roof collapsing in on the cottage.
Everything that the car-thief had said was true. Popolac was a city and a giant; and it had gone into the hills. Now their eyes were becoming accustomed to the night light.
They could see in ever more horrible detail the way this monster was constructed. It was a masterpiece of human engineering: a man made entirely of men. Or rather, a sexless giant, made of men and women and children. All the citizens of Popolac writhed and strained in the body of this flesh-knitted giant, their muscles stretched to breaking point, their bones close to snapping.
They could see how the architects of Popolac had subtly altered the proportions of the human body; how the thing had been made squatter to lower its centre of gravity; how its legs had been made elephantine to bear the weight of the torso; how the head was sunk low on to the wide shoulders, so that the problems of a weak neck had been minimized.
Despite these malformations, it was horribly life-like. The bodies that were bound together to make its surface were naked but for their harnesses, so that its surface glistened in the starlight, like one vast human torso. Even the muscles were well copied, though simplified. They could see the way the roped bodies pushed and pulled against each other in solid cords of flesh and bone. They could see the intertwined people that made up the body: the backs like turtles packed together to offer the sweep of the pectorals; the lashed and knotted acrobats at the joints of the arms and the legs alike, rolling and unwinding to articulate the city.
But surely the most amazing sight of all was the face.
Cheeks of bodies; cavernous eye-sockets in which heads stared, five bound together for each eyeball; a broad, flat nose and a mouth that opened and closed, as the muscles of the jaw bunched and hollowed rhythmically. And from that mouth, lined with teeth of bald children, the voice of the giant, now only a weak copy of its
former powers, spoke a single note of idiot music.
Popolac walked and Popolac sang.
Was there ever a sight in Europe the equal of it?
They watched, Mick and Judd, as it took another step towards them.
The old man had wet his pants. Blubbering and begging, he dragged himself away from the ruined cottage into the surrounding trees, dragging his dead legs after him.
The Englishmen remained where they stood, watching the spectacle as it approached. Neither dread nor horror touched them now, just an awe that rooted them to the spot. They knew this was a sight they could never hope to see again; this was the apex – after this there was only common experience. Better to stay then, though every step brought death nearer, better to stay and see the sight while it was still there to be seen. And if it killed them, this monster, then at least they would have glimpsed a miracle, known this terrible majesty for a brief moment. It seemed a fair exchange.
Popolac was within two steps of the cottage. They could see the complexities of its structure quite clearly. The faces of the citizens were becoming detailed: white, sweat-wet, and content in their weariness. Some hung dead from their harnesses, their legs swinging back and forth like the hanged. Others, children particularly, had ceased to obey their training, and had relaxed their positions, so that the form of the body was degenerating, beginning to seethe with the boils of rebellious cells.
Yet it still walked, each step an incalculable effort of coordination and strength.
Boom -The step that trod the cottage came sooner than they thought.
Mick saw the leg raised; saw the faces of the people in the shin and ankle and foot – they were as big as he was now – all huge men chosen to take the full weight of this great creation.
Many were dead. The bottom of the foot, he could see, was a jigsaw of crushed and bloody bodies, pressed to death under the weight of their fellow citizens.
The foot descended with a roar.
In a matter of seconds the cottage was reduced to splinters and dust.
Popolac blotted the sky utterly. It was, for a moment, the whole world, heaven and earth, its presence filled the senses to overflowing. At this proximity one look could not encompass it, the eye had to range backwards and forwards over its mass to take it all in, and even then the mind refused to accept the whole truth. A whirling fragment of stone, flung off from the cottage as it collapsed, struck Judd full in the face. In his head he heard the killing stroke like a ball hitting a wall: a play-yard death. No pain: no remorse. Out like a light, a tiny, insignificant light; his death-cry lost in the pandemonium, his body hidden in the smoke and darkness. Mick neither saw nor heard Judd die.