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 abs
orb 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 ou
r 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.