Babel Tower Read online

  At that time it was also the springtime of the year, or just before. She still rode in a quilted jacket, but had laid aside her fur wraps and her furred hat, and went covered only in a light hood. She had discovered many wide rides, which, as they penetrated deeper under the cover of the trees, became little twisting paths which opened on pretty glades in some of which the first flowers were springing on the green turf, aconites and hellebores, primroses and shy violets. And she would dismount and wander distractedly amongst the dark trunks, seeing how the bright little buds advanced each week, and appropriating these secret places in her mind, saying, My primroses are further on than I had supposed, or, My thrush is making a great song and dance in my hazel coppice. She began to think of herself as the dryad of those trees, tending them, though she did nothing but stare and smile and walk to and fro. And she would get bolder and explore a little more and a little more, extending her domain, savouring the scents and the singing in the thickets, thinking sometimes of how she would pass the rest of her days in La Tour Bruyarde and sometimes more vaguely of what might be taking place in the world beyond the valley, in cities and harbours, on roads and highways, along rivers and on the open sea. A hen pheasant led a procession of little chicks across her path, and she bent to cup one of the soft little things in her hands, but they cried out, cheeping, and scattered and she followed, clutching her skirts and pushing back brambles and thorny branches from her face, seeing the burnished bronze of the female feathers flash amongst dead bracken, and so going onwards, until she came to another clearing where the trees were higher and blacker and not in bud, though they bore strange fruit. The clearing was circular and the trees held out their black stiff arms, and at their arms’ length swung swaying and creaking things that she took at first for suits of clothing, or scarecrows, and then saw clearly to be the thing itself, human creatures whose faces were black, whose eyes were plucked by beaks, whose bellies were swollen and stank.

  They turned and creaked, and the trees stood stiffly and rattled and creaked. And a voice behind Roseace said, so that her heart stopped, “The fruit of the forest, eh, my lady?”

  Roseace turned, trembling with fear or outrage, and there close behind her was Colonel Grim, who must have crept up whilst she was preoccupied with brambles, and come close, close, whilst she stared at dead men.

  “Et ego in Arcadia, is it not so, my lady? I am sorry if I gave you a fright. May I escort you away from these danglers, back to your pastoral hiding place?”

  “I did not hear you.”

  “That is natural. You were preoccupied and I am a trained tracker of beasts and men. Allow me to hold back these branches for you.”

  “I came here to be alone.”

  “That is evident, and so you shall be. But it would be less than chivalrous in me to leave you quite immediately, quite suddenly, after you have had the shock of coming upon our fellow creatures in the state they are in.”

  “Who are they?”

  “That I do not know. Such gatherings are alas not uncommon in these reaches of the forest. The usual explanation is that they are the victims of the Krebs, though the Krebs, like all bloody tribes, are made responsible for many foul things done by others.”

  “I do not know of the Krebs,” said the Lady Roseace, standing stock-still and reluctant to turn back, for to turn back would be to touch in some way the bulky body of Colonel Grim. Like most if not all the inhabitants of La Tour Bruyarde, she felt a strong aversion to the idea of touching the Colonel. Whether or not he was aware of this, the Colonel took her by the arm and led her back through the branches to the previous clearing, where he invited her to sit on a mossy stump and recover her senses. The Lady Roseace had seen worse sights in the Revolutionary wars from which she had so decisively fled, and would have returned haughtily to her horse, if it were not for an uneasy sense that it would do her no good to make an enemy of Grim. So she sat, toying with her whip, and accepted a silver cannikin of aquavit from his flask.

  “The Krebs,” said Grim, “are a people, or tribe, who inhabit, or infest, the deep forests and the caves under the mountains. They are short and swarthy, and their bodies are hairy. They have an odour which is offensive to delicate nostrils, and an incomprehensible speech of grunts and spitting. They are not often seen—they hunt in packs, wearing furs and carrying leather bucklers. There is much dispute amongst the learned as to whether they are or are not human creatures. They have a reluctance to leave even their dead in human hands, with the result that we have been unable to examine even a corpse. No one has ever seen a female Krebs, unless it is that the two sexes are indistinguishable and fight side by side, fur-wrapped. They take no prisoners and destroy those who have seen them, it is said, either by blinding, or more often by the punishment of death. It is not good to have come even so close to their trails as to have seen those danglers, my lady. As far as I could see, the peculiar nooses of leather from which they dangle are the work of the Krebs, but I know—it is my business to know—that there are also roaming gangs of more ordinary villains and outlaws who imitate their styles, to safeguard, with fear, their own hiding places.”

  “You know a great deal,” said the Lady Roseace.

  “I patrol the bounds of Culvert’s kingdom, my child,” said the old soldier. “It is more vulnerable on this south side than he thinks, and the outside world has not ceased to exist because he has closed it off and turned away from it. I advise you to ride no more in these glades if you do not wish to become scattered bones and a skull picked clean.”

  He looked at her lovely face, with its full lips and wide, clear eyes suffused with sparkling liquid, and under the fine flesh of her face the Lady Roseace felt he saw her bone-cage, with staring sockets, dark nasal pits, and rattling pearly teeth in a gaunt jawbone. She bent her head in silence, and her interlocutor continued.

  “And I should like to ask, if it is not impertinent, why you ride out so frequently into these woods, and always alone? It might be thought by prurient minds that you have assignations of some kind, but I have been your invisible companion on these wanderings from the first, and can vouch for your innocence of outside intrigues.”

  The Lady Roseace’s breasts and throat were flooded with sudden heat as she answered, with her prepared answer:

  “Culvert wishes to provide for the full exercise of all human passions, which he believes to be intrinsically valuable because they are human. And I have a newly discovered passion for solitude and secrecy, solitude, secrecy and wild nature, a not uncommon, indeed a banal, human passion, which I indulge. Or thought I indulged, until you revealed to me a moment ago that my solitude was an illusion, a most displeasing revelation.”

  “I could say I feared you might need sudden protection from the Krebs,” Grim replied, seating himself on an adjacent stump and settling, it appeared, for a long conversation. “Or I could say I feared you were betraying the community, though that explanation does, I agree, lack plausibility. Or I could say, with truth, ma’am, that I have a longstanding passion for information, for knowing exactly the doings and comings and goings of everyone else. I have been a spy in my time, my lady, and it is an avocation that gives intense passional pleasure to men of my type. Here such passions can be freely acknowledged. Here they do no harm. If you take my advice, and wander no longer in these woods, you will never know from what horrors my inconvenient passion may have saved you.”

  The Lady Roseace compressed her lovely lips, for she saw both the sense and the chafing inconvenience of what he said.

  “You take no pleasure in Culvert’s popular discussions of pleasure?” the grim man asked, more conversationally. “I have noticed you are frequently absent from these delightful consortiums, into which the majority of our fellow citizens throw themselves with such passion.”

  “They repeat themselves somewhat tediously,” replied the lady. “Their discussions are circular and rambling, and return again and again to the same assertions, which are not greatly elaborated from their first appea
rance. I agree with you that our fellow inhabitants do indeed take intense pleasure in these contests and concords of debate, but a passion for discussion, like the more usual female passion for gossip and scandal, appears to have been left out of my make-up. Indeed,” she went on, interested enough in herself to forget her mistrust of her companion, “those aspects of my nature which caused me to seek this retreat, a desire for solitude, for retirement from the hurly-burly of meaningless, or alternatively dangerous, social activity, make me peculiarly unfitted for the incessant and almost feverish social activity which has, very naturally, it appears, sprung to life in our midst. I admire—I have always admired, even adored—the force, and charm, and powerful intelligence of Culvert. I see the logic of his endeavours to reform—or restore—human nature. But I am not prepared—not ready—not sufficiently convinced of the inevitability of his analysis—to submit myself to all his projects.”

  “I believe,” said the Colonel, “that this morning’s debate was to be on the pleasures and pains of micturition and evacuation, on the interest taken by certain persons, including some in our company, in the products thereof, liquids and solids both, and the relations, in the experience again of certain persons, of these processes with the intimate—or solitary—processes of love and desire. Do I have it pat?”

  “More or less,” said the lady, her mind straying to her own mild pleasures in these matters. A blush then spread over her whole body as she realised that if, as he said, the Colonel had been present unseen during all her wanderings, he must have seen her squatting amongst celandines and sighing with relief and delight as she loosed a streaming puddle into the mossy earth. Had he looked away, did he take pleasure in watching? She had held her skirts bunched high and had felt the balmy air circulating around those white and shapely buttocks, that warm and clinging slit which Culvert wished to offer on stage to the admiring gaze of the whole community. Had Grim seen her with pleasure, and if so, with what kind of pleasure? The idea of his secret eyes was more unpleasant, more interesting and more disturbing to the peace of her inner passages than Culvert’s public project.

  “If he can excite the community to excite themselves about these matters,” the Colonel continued imperturbably, “he will have achieved a subtle political coup, and will be well on the way to solving his urgent housekeeping problem. For we positively must solve the problem of equitable shit-shifting, madame, companion, our very existence depends on it. I have seen fevers run riot in gaols and military camps with festering sanitation.”

  Roseace had no answer to this, so sat quietly, toying still with her whip.

  “He must have foreseen,” said the Colonel, “that point still to come when the discussion of the liberation of passions brings us to the liberation of those passions which take pleasure in the hurt of others. I do not speak of a manacle a little too tight, or a whipping that raises a man’s member in protesting bliss, such things can be accommodated for our delectation and instruction, on stage or in the bedchambers and dungeons. No, I am curious about the point at which your Culvert will come to consider the pleasures felt by crowds in their Sunday best who watch the heads fall under the axe, or the lion’s teeth sever the gladiator’s jugular. Can he stage a public hanging and stop short of death? For he may find one suicide amongst us who will offer himself once—and once only—to those whose delight is to make meat of others. It may be that he can find more who have discovered, deliberately or inadvertently, the unsurpassable excitement of spending themselves, of dying in the poets’ metaphysical sense, at the precise moment of giving up the ghost with the spurting seed, as the noose tightens, as those poor danglers must have done with no one to cut them down. A dangerous game, Madame Roseace, and still no real satisfaction to the meat-makers.”

  “Culvert would never countenance making one man happy at another’s expense,” retorted the lady, though she was inwardly troubled about adjustments of happiness to be made between herself, Culvert and Damian. “And your interest in bloodthirstiness, Colonel Grim, must stem from your own bloody nature, which you have acknowledged, and renounced, I believe.”

  “My pleasures, in part,” he answered, “derive from the strategies of warfare, which have no place in our sealed and separate world, but may yet be needed to defend it. But I see that I have distressed you with my idle and perhaps wholly unfounded speculations, and I can assure you that I take no pleasure at all in torturing the imagination of the fairer and gentler sex. Shall we return to La Tour Bruyarde?”

  “I am reluctant to do so,” she answered, courteously enough. “The air is so balmy, the flowers and trees so soothing, despite the terrible fruit on the thorn trees in the next clearing. I feel well, out here, and would like to journey farther.”

  “I do counsel you most strongly not to do so,” said he. “This is not a good place, not friendly to innocent humans, however it may wear a spring smile. Let me show you something, madame.”

  “I do not wish to go back to the danglers,” said the lady, using the Colonel’s word to disguise her nausea at the thought of them.

  “There is no need, madame. Break off a twig from a thorn tree in this clearing—a young twig, not a dead one.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Do it.”

  So she put out her hand and broke off a green twig, with tight, energetic little buds. And from the severed end came a slow dark gout of blood, a clot of thick blood like a liver-coloured slug humping its way free, and behind it gushed a freshet of red blood, which sprayed her habit with fine scarlet drops. She drew back in horror, crying out, brushing her hand against her skirt so that her fingers in turn were blooded. She begged the Colonel earnestly to tell her the reason and meaning of this phenomenon.

  “I do not know for certain,” he replied. “Various explanations have been put forth, all of them hypothetical, not to say, in certain cases, metaphysical. You will be aware, as a lady of culture, that the divine poet, Dante Alighieri, ascribes this phenomenon to the Wood of the Suicides in his journey through the Inferno, and the association of hanged men and this bloody sap persists also in the popular imagination in these parts. More vaguely, it is said that this is a place where so many men have been slaughtered, by the Krebs, or by others of their own kind, that the earth is drunk with blood and bonemeal; which bubbles up so prevalently that the trees cannot convert it to innocent green ichor, or phloem, or sap, but must regurgitate it in horror and disgust. And then there is a contrary legend, which asserts that the earth and the trees here hate men—like the Krebs, who are in some sense their foresters and semblables—and take pleasure in consuming the dead or the unwary who lie against their roots or under their shade. And there is also a tale, such as you will find all over the world, but without the attestation of bloody sap, that the trees are transfigured men and women, or maybe transfigured Krebs, that the Krebs may be trees that walk, or that these trees and the Krebs may bear the same relation to each other as do the caterpillar and the butterfly—men’s ingenuity, and men’s dreaming, make reasons for everything, as bees make honey, or trees make fruit. I only know that to me the place gives off a scent of hatred and pain. I am not welcome here. Nor are you.”

  The Lady Roseace shuddered with a primitive fear and disgust at these words, and allowed herself finally to be led back to her horse, and mounted by the Colonel.

  They rode back over the plain to the Tower together; Roseace turned over many things in her mind. The sky was full of great full-bellied clouds, like flying clippers, like rolling drunkards, like racing steeds, fleeing before the wind. The Tower was above them, alternately in deep shadow, and bathed in brilliant golden light. It was not a shapely building, seen in this aspect. Its decaying ledges and terraces ran into one another, so that certain aspects appeared like a heap of rubble, or a rocky chaos, or an accidental heap. But under the sunlight, even from a distance, its inhabitants could be seen rushing zestfully about their business along couloirs and arcades, so that the huge mass pullulated with human life like an anthe
ap. And the Lady Roseace, as she rode on, with the man of blood ambling quietly at her side, did not know if it was a longed-for home and haven, or voluntarily chosen In-pace, that is to say, dungeon.

  “We are a Society for the Protection of Frederica,” says Tony Watson.

  “A Society for the Promotion of the Fortunes of Frederica,” says Alan Melville.

  They are meeting in Alexander Wedderburn’s flat in Great Ormond Street, where, it had been agreed, she would be most comfortable and least likely to be immediately discovered. Alexander, surprised by various dawn telephone calls, has given up his bed to Frederica and her son, whom it is difficult to separate from her. His bed is large and comfortable. Frederica, after a fitful sleep, woke in it in one of his shirts and thought grimly of the irony of finally coming where she had for so many years hopelessly desired to be. She has even left two or three token smears of blood on Alexander’s sheets, from the inflamed wound in her haunch. Alexander himself has passed a perfectly comfortable night in his spare bedroom, but he is apprehensive. The three friends have given him a colourful and alarming account of the vengeful and violent nature of Nigel, whom Tony, perhaps unfortunately, has labelled the Axeman.