‘No, he isn’t in Dubrovnik. I was there two weeks ago, but someone there told me he’d seen the Machine on Korcula island.’
‘I heard he’d been in Ploce. The Abbot sent soldiers down to capture him, but the crowd refused to let them near.’
Meanwhile, unknown to me, the great tectonic plates of history were grinding together. In Vienna, Catholic and Orthodox leaders from south east Europe gathered to discuss a suspension of their many wars, and the formation of a Holy Alliance against the godless City in their midst. Even the Muslim Bey of Novi Pazar had sent a delegation.
I was travelling through lands against which my country was about to be at war.
Then a rain began which continued almost without a break for many days. My clothes never had a chance to dry out. I never felt warm and my skin turned puffy and white. Cuts and blisters on my feet became infected and swollen. I developed a fever and become confused in my mind. I no longer travelled through an external landscape. My world became the jagged mountains of my aching feet, the dark swamp of my throbbing head, the bitter gales of my frozen hands…
But from time to time I would look down from this landscape and see, far below me, a tiny sodden figure, limping slowly along a muddy mountain road.
‘Why must I always watch this one?’ I complained. ‘Always, always him. Why this one and no one else?’
Sheltering one day under an overhanging rock, I lapsed into a dream of Lucy. Somehow she had been transformed into a real human being. I was pleased at first and reached out to welcome her. And she smiled but then began once again to rip away her flesh. This time there was no plastic shell underneath. Guts, lungs, a throbbing heart, a liver – softly pulsating organs slid out of her with a soft plopping sound… Lucy laughed. I was suddenly woken by a bellow of rage from the sky.
It was Illyrian jets, speeding north to Vienna to punish the holy conspirators with fire.
Rain trickled down onto my face from the rock above.
After a while I began to clamber painfully to my feet and it was then that I realized I wasn’t alone. Three hunters were also sheltering there, further along the overhang, beside a small fire. Until I moved, they hadn’t noticed me. Now they looked at each other and grinned.
‘Where are you from my friend?’ said the first one, coming over to me.
‘What are you carrying with you?’
‘Don’t you know that this is private land?’
Their nicotine-stained gap-teeth were like fangs. They were like wolves surrounding me.
‘So you are a City boy are you?’
‘Your Chinky President has just declared war on us, my friend.’
‘So that makes you an enemy, doesn’t it? Eh? That makes you an enemy.’
A boot crashed into my groin. The grey landscape of my head splintered into shards of nausea and pain. The small sodden figure gave a pathetic cry.
And then the three men were suddenly all over me, pulling out my wallet, pulling off the old peasant’s shoes that the widow woman had given me.
‘Look at this! Good City dollars!’
‘This passport will be worth a few dinars.’
‘Yes, but now let’s teach this pretty City boy a real lesson.’
The others laughed. Hands tugged once again at my clothing. I expected to be beaten. It was only at the last moment that I realized that I was going to be raped.
I watched from a great height as one after the other they violated me. It was horribly painful I noticed. It felt as if my whole bowel was being split open.
And then it seemed that this phase too had ended. They still seemed to be kicking me once in a while but that really didn’t matter. The world was quiet again and almost peaceful. Face down in the mud, my pants down to my knees, I lapsed back into dreams.
Once again Lucy tore open her body, once again the organs came sliding out. I could feel the pain of it as though it was happening to me…
I opened my eyes and realized that I was alone. Where were the hunters? I vaguely remembered the men kicking me after they had buggered me but what happened after that I wasn’t sure. Perhaps they had still been kicking me when I fell back to sleep? But at some point, in any case, the three hunters had left.
Very possibly they had left me for dead.
65
I was lucky. The rocky overhang where I had sheltered was just below the top of a pass. And when I staggered up it I saw that there was a settlement not far below the ridge on the other side: a score or so of pantiled houses surrounded by trees and fields, and a large white religious building with a bell-tower, a monastery of some kind, at the village’s heart.
Very slowly I made my way down the hill, dragging one leg like an old man. There was a lull in the rain, but water was everywhere. Streams gurgled and tinkled all around me. Muddy water ran in rivulets across the road. I remember I saw a lizard on the stony ground. Because of the cold, it moved away from me not with the normal darting motion of lizards, but in slow motion, one leg at a time.
At the outskirts of the village I met a young man with a long, wet moustache.
‘Excuse me,’ I murmured, ‘excuse me…’
I reached out to him and touched his sleeve. He pulled his arm away indignantly, then dived into a house and slammed the door.
The clouds were breaking up overhead into rags of grey and white and the sun shone through in patches: a tree illuminated here, a ruined house there… The mountainside which I had just descended was now blazing with brilliant, yellow light.
I passed closed doors and shuttered windows. A thin dog came trotting past. It paused to sniff at me, as if wondering whether there was any flesh left on me worth eating.
At the centre of the village there was a square with single shop and a police station, both of them closed and shuttered up. There was a ruined building and some deserted-looking houses. The long, white wall of the monastery formed one whole side of the square. It had barred windows with pale blue stonework around them, and a single, large ornate door.
I hesitated. Where was this? Bosnia? Montenegro? Dalmatia? Istria? Venetia? What alphabet was that above the door of the police station? What language did they speak? I swayed and tottered and nearly fell.
And what religion was it here, I wondered (for I had noticed that geography was the main determinant of religious belief)? Which God did they follow? Should I ask for alms in the name of Allah, or Jesus Christ, or Bogomil, or… who? Some Slavonic god of plenty? To my confused, feverish mind, the question seemed both insoluble and frighteningly important. That dull, persistent aching feeling was pressing heavily against the inside of my eyes.
Which God? Couldn’t I at least know which God?
Help came in the form of a solitary figure in black hurrying across the square. It was an elderly widow, tightly clutching an enormous brown cockerel in both arms.
‘What kind of monastery is this?’ I asked her. ‘Who is it dedicated to?’
I must have spoken something that at least approximated to her own language. She stopped and looked at me.
‘You poor boy! You must go in! The monks are good. They will give you help.’
‘But what kind of monks? Who do they believe in?’
‘They are kind and holy. They’ll help you.’
‘Please,’ I grabbed her arm. ‘Please tell me. What do they believe in?’
She stared at me. Something in my face shocked her. She released the cockerel’s neck, so as to free her right hand to cross herself.
‘It is a monastery of the Roman Church,’ she said, ‘but now that it is given over to the Holy Machine, may the Lord bless his name, who knows what church it belongs to.’