FIC: Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage -- an ANTIDOTE TO SORROW story.
Author's Notes
I really can't overstate my incredulity at how long this has taken (or just how long it IS , I thought it might be a FICLET, HA. ) but here I am back at last and this... this technically isn't the next part of Antidote to Sorrow. (3rd person POV and present tense ZOMG!) But! Although this is a freestander, and can be read without any reference to Antidote, it still is part of the same story. I saw this prompt on the meme and was all, “Oooh... that could be that thing that happens in the backstory -- maybe it would be nice if we see that happen, instead of just having people talk about it later...”)
So. If you are reading Antidote to Sorrow, events herein are taking place between chapters 1 and 2 and if not... everything should be self-explanatory.
Summary: A tall, thin, grey-eyed foreigner, running for his life.
Warnings: Drugs, self-inflicted gruesomeness.
Canon stories: DYIN, FINA, EMPT
6,700 words.
Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage
It has always been a matter of necessity.
A man who can speak nine languages - French like a native, German and Italian well enough to fool anyone who is neither German or Italian - a man who can read danger from a scrape on a wall or the twitch of a hand - a man who can simply, when it comes to it, run very fast, has certain advantages when in exile.
They are not, however, limitless.
He can contort his face and his body for hours but not weeks at a time. One cannot paint one’s skin with walnut juice or attach false eyebrows every morning while trekking across the Tian Shan in the company of a pair of Hindoo monks. And there is the colour of his eyes, which he would give a great deal to be able to alter.
He has been an explorer, a chemist, a musician, a spy. He can be almost anything - except, he has discovered, unremarkable. He has worn more names and been more people than he can bear to recall (Guillaume Ferier. Johannes Reinhardt. Hans Sigerson) but each one of them, quite against his intentions, has turned out to be in some way singular. They cannot exist at any length before they begin to be talked of, these tall, pale-eyed, wandering foreigners with their peculiar talents and bad habit of committing exploits that get into the papers. He even apprehended a murderer in Jaipur and prevented a kidnapping in Samarkand - hardly wise acts in terms of self-preservation, but what else was he to do?
So it is not particularly surprising when he realises he is being followed again. He has just drained his last sweet, smoky coffee of the evening and risen from his seat outside a kıraathane on Galata Bridge. He walks south towards Eminonu while the voices of the muezzin float out across the city and the last evening light scatters in flakes of iron and gold over the Bosphorus. And there are two local thugs lumbering along behind him, as subtle as pair of charging elephants -- they are far too close, they try to shuffle into a shop doorway when he turns his head and he can smell the hashish on them from twenty yards away. It is so crudely done that if this were London, he might be amused, or perhaps a little insulted.
As it is, he cannot help his eyelids sinking shut in protest as he walks, and for an instant his mouth fills with the weight of an unsounded groan. He knew he was taking a risk in working so close to the British Consulate, (though there were advantages to that too)but he is just one of several eccentric European nomads who circulate around and through Constantinople’s Imperial Museum. In his two months in the small office behind the Mesopotamian exhibit, he has done nothing more outlandish than quietly translate reports from a German excavation team working on Sumerian ruins in Nippur. He had hoped for longer.
He gains the south side of the Golden Horn and sheds his pursuers without difficulty in the Bazaar. The mild stimulus of the coffee drops away along with the adrenaline and he leans against the rough stone of the Roman aqueduct, passing a hand over his face. Is it possible they were not working for anyone, that it was only his wallet they were after? For surely they can have no idea whom they were tracking so clumsily . . .
Well, he is practised at finding the answers to such questions: now to work. He waits for the decision to whittle him down to a sharp, clean point, for every extraneous, fallible part of himself to be pared away. It always happens.
They would not have troubled to follow him had they known where he sleeps. So - provided he observes the usual precautions -- he can return to his room above the saucepan shop in the han, but he will not assume it is safe to stay there. (The one safe assumption, he has found, is usually that it is not safe to stay anywhere). He takes such a long, stealthy, circuitous route back to the sooty square that it is dark by the time he reaches it. But he makes no effort not to be seen entering; as he climbs the steps to the gallery that frames the courtyard and its dry fountain, he even catches the eye of one of the Persian traders staying in a neighbouring room, and smiles - which is more or less unprecedented.
He is scarcely inside his white-washed room for two minutes, long enough to remove his jacket and sweep his hair out of the fussy centre parting, fold away the pair of small round spectacles of the prim, harmless scholar he has been here. He does not look at the narrow flock-bed on the floor. It was heaving with lice when he first arrived, but he fumigated the place with a reeking chemical concoction of his own, to the consternation of the neighbours - and it can’t be that word of that has got out, can it? His knapsack is always packed and near the door; this time, however, he lowers it out of the window into the dirty yard behind the saucepan shop, and climbs deftly down after it. He has left a lamp burning within; if anyone does trace him to this room tonight, he is happy for them to suppose it occupied.
He turns into the maze of lanes behind the Spice Bazaar. A couple are engaged in a furious argument in an upstairs room, the shutters are open and there’s enough light for him to complete his preparations in the alley below. He assembles a thickset, heavily whiskered Greek merchant seaman, who stands a few aching inches shorter than his own height, and sets out.
He searches for his enemies by searching for himself. He hunts a phantom, fugitive Englishman through Constantinople and watches for any fellow-travellers along the way. First he crosses back across the bridge to Pera, and the large European hotels there. There has been a break-in at the Hotel de Byzance, and someone other than the clerk has been thumbing through the ledger at Misseri’s, though the fact that he can smell hashish again is hardly conclusive.
The Greek sailor ambles in and out of the taverns on Cadde-i Kebir, chatting to tourists, and harassing merchants in heavily accented Turkish or English about a friend; tall, thin; black hair and grey eyes; a long beaky nose, a clever fellow; speaks a lot of languages, and no one’s eyes narrow in recognition or suspicion, no one demands to know why everyone is asking after gangling polyglots tonight, and this is a city of a million souls, after all -- perhaps all this is unnecessary, perhaps the men on Galata Bridge were only thieves, and he could return to the bare room and the narrow flock bed in the han. He feels as if he could sleep tonight, plunge deep down and never break the surface until morning, although it has been a very long time since any such thing has happened.
He spends the last of the night sitting in the Martyrs’ Cemetery, his back to a cypress tree, smoking as the stars fade. Perhaps he does sleep, a few grey, drifting minutes out of each hour. The cemetery’s many dogs go off into rounds of barking every half hour or so, which he does not resent, it is as well to be kept on his guard. Certainly he is already awake when the pale minarets of Fatih Mosque begin to emerge out of the darkness, and the first call to prayer sounds.
He heads to the Imperial Museum as early as he dares.
“I heard someone I know might be working here,” he begins, and again lists all the qualities his selves have, regrettably, had in common.
The doorman is immaculate in crisp manila uniform and well-brushed fez. “Not another of you,” he says, raising impressive eyebrows. “I told your friend yesterday; Herr Amiel isn’t in, and what he has to do with the likes of you I can’t imagine.”
The Greek sailor nods expressionlessly and turns away.
He has kept Herr Amiel’s round glasses in his pocket all this time. He leaves them on the balustrade of Galata Bridge, on the absurd idea that perhaps they may be of use to somebody else. He plucks off the Greek sailor’s whiskers, and less because it might be distinctive than because he suddenly can’t bear it on his face any longer, he shaves off a small straight moustache in one of the public conveniences by a mosque. Now he is neither the Greek sailor nor the Austrian scholar, he is no one in particular. A dangerous state, a grey primer onto which he will, again, have to paint an entirely new life.
And something within him moans, I can’t. His lips purse briefly in irritation as he submerges himself in a rush hour crowd, hurrying onto a ferry across the Bosphorus. He can. Of course he can.
But how many more times, how many more names, how many more years, before he reaches the end of this?
He has memorised the train timetables of every city in which he has spent more than a single night and some into which he has never yet set foot. He has a few hours to get through in Constantinople yet, and he passes some of them simply hiding among the almond trees in the little park behind the tobacco warehouse, some down in the market by Scutari’s docks, where he buys provisions for the journey, though he finds it difficult to imagine eating them. His shoulders are beginning to ache already under the weight of his knapsack.
He waits until just minutes before the train for Angora is due to leave, then walks into Haidar Pasha station, stands at his full height in the queue and lets an English accent swagger its way to the front of his voice as he purchases a ticket. He wishes to be noticed, doing this, and it works: the man he observed leaning against a pillar near the gates, watching the passengers come and go - the one who looked at him suspiciously as he came in and who carries a cosh of some kind under his jacket - is now very interested indeed, interested enough to move swiftly after him towards the platform. But he is waylaid by a pair of ticket inspectors - and why didn’t the fool simply equip himself with a set of tickets for various trains earlier? - and his quarry steps onto the Angora train without giving any sign of having noticed him at all.
He moves down the train until he is level with a signal box on the platform opposite, and climbs out onto the tracks. He darts across the rails, scrambles up behind the box and into the cover of a few blackened trees. A child sitting aboard the Angora train has witnessed this and is staring out at him, open-mouthed, and starts dragging at his mother’s sleeve and pointing but the dullard pursing him has not seen him and breaks through onto the platform in time to scowl after the Angora train as it steams away.
Briefly, the fugitive smiles to himself as he swings himself up over a wall and into a scrubby little no-man’s-land of discarded cable-reels and rotten sleepers.
The almost-English syllables he spoke at the ticket-office linger on his tongue like an after-taste. All this time he has so rarely heard his own unmodulated voice, except in those rare, desperate solitary occasions when he has caught himself speaking aloud in a breathless undertone, and even then he does not sound particularly like himself. Even in his head, English is stifled and squeezed between so many other languages: he always said a brain contains limited storage space. Sometimes he finds that English words have gone missing, leaving behind horrible, itching little patches of nothing. Once in Lhasa he suffered twenty disconcerting minutes unable to recall the word relinquish. He had to go through the bizarre process of translating from Tibetan to Latin before he could find it.
Perhaps he should be English again soon. Perhaps after all this time it would be a suitably unexpected tactic.
The idea dies a swift natural death.
Down at the docks beside the station, he crams himself into a shadowed space between a workshop wall and a stack of pallets, and spends almost two hours waiting, observing the stevedores as they load the freighters. As one o’clock passes, the undulating web of calling voices strings itself between the cities’ minarets again, and the men stop work, flex aching necks and shoulders, and troop over to a standpipe to wash their hands and heads for prayer. Keeping low, he darts across the wharf and ducks nto the cover of a pile of sacks. The workers group over in the forecourt of a warehouse and turn to face the East. And he moves again, as they dip their faces towards the ground. He has no time to make it aboard the steam-ship he has chosen, but as he hoped, they do not immediately resume work. He is crouched behind a row of barrels of chromate of iron, as some open packs of flatbread and cheese and anchovies, others go to greet wives and children approaching with baskets of köfte and fried vegetables.
He races up the ramp, and down into the lower hold.
It is pitch black down here, and soon it grows stickily, airlessly hot - he is close to the ship’s boilers. Still, he feels his pulse settle gratefully into a slower rhythm when he hears the engine begin to wheeze and pound and feels the ship move at last, out into the Black Sea.
He spends nine, ten stifling hours there in the dark, always awake. Somewhere around midnight he creeps out, past the men shovelling coal into the furnace, onto deck, and gasps with relief at the cool air. He won’t return to the hold, not merely because it’s uncomfortable but because he needs to be poised to get ashore quickly when they reach Varna, and he has certain preparations to make. It is likely to be even more difficult getting off this ship unobserved than it was getting on.
There is a fan-shaped space behind the deckhouse; there are a couple of crates here and a tarpaulin he can use for cover, when it gets light again. As he sits down cross-legged his eyes catch on the rivets on the panelling beside him, and it strikes him poignantly that this ship is British-made. She is twenty years old, or thereabouts. He was at Oxford, perhaps, while she steamed out for the first time from Portsmouth or Hampton-on-Thames.
He does not want to think about Oxford, or any part of his own past.
He thinks instead about the state and colour of the paint, and estimates the Ottoman Maritime Company purchased her about three years ago. Her name has been changed, which he believes he heard somewhere was unlucky. He catches himself foolishly stroking a hand over the steelwork.
He is not sure if the blackness pulling at him deserves the name of sleep, but whatever it is, he can’t give way to it here. He had no serious difficulty in evading the attention of the man standing lookout on the fo’csle head as he came out onto deck, but he must remain alert. If he is caught he will either be clapped in jail as soon as they make landfall, or carried back to Constantinople, and either eventuality will shorten his odds considerably.
It is wholly essential then, entirely a matter of necessity, that he set out his supplies on the deck in front of him, and try to find a vein by moonlight.
He has no better travelling case for this syringe than the cardboard box it came in, and it has half fallen out inside his pack, though it is thankfully unbroken. He is as careful as he can be in the circumstances; he always puts it away clean, and he sluices it with water from his flask before opening the cocaine-bottle and drawing a load of bright fluid into the chamber, like a crystal bullet. With his back against the deckhouse, he slides the needle in.
And the point goes too deep, goes through -- hurts more than it should.
He flinches, repositions, pushes the plunger home.
Wakefulness shrills down his nerves. The stars seethe.
The sea grows rougher as they approach Bulgaria, and Varna’s shore, bristling with loading cranes, looks bleak and hostile in the sullen dawn light. He cannot make any elaborate adjustments to his appearance, but he jams a cap low on his brow, shoves his knapsack into a burlap sack and shoulders it, and hopes the Bulgarian dockhands will take him for one of the Turkish crew, and vice versa.
He picks his moment and saunters down the ramp. He gets the solid quayside under his feet with a tiny glow of triumph.
Then there’s a shout. Without looking back, he breaks into a run. He knows abstractly that after all he’s demanded of his body recently, it is not surprising that he’s not as fast as usual - it is not strange if the men are gaining on him. Nevertheless he is surprised, he labours for breath, and to push his muscles harder, and he can’t quite take in that it isn’t easier.
He scrambles over a gate, sprints down a muddy alley, collapses behind a wall and lies panting against his knapsack, struggling to get his breath back. For what feels like a long time, he can’t.
He forces himself back to his feet and hoists his pack onto his shoulders. And as the strap passes over his left arm, pain ignites there, as if the strap has snagged on a splinter of shrapnel lodged in his flesh, and he buckles helplessly back against the wall with a gasp.
Another struggle to steady his breathing. He puts the knapsack down, draws his arm gingerly out of his coat, and rolls up his shirtsleeve.
The puncture in the crook of his arm looks far too small to have hurt so badly. It is wet and a little raised, an angry pink flaring around it.
He stares at it for a second.
He cannot stay in Varna. His subterfuge at Constantinople will not deflect his enemies towards Angora indefinitely; Varna is too obvious an alternative destination. Besides, he has been here before, and encountered trouble. The first train for Rousse is leaving in an hour and he must be on it.
He rolls down his sleeve.
He cleans himself up a little at the station, and at last slumps gratefully onto a third class seat. He can afford no better for the moment - he has almost fifty pounds stowed away in his knapsack, but only a little of it is in Bulgarian lev, and he does not wish to startle the ticket officer with foreign currency. He manages to complete the exchange in noncommittal monosyllables. Constructing a new identity is becoming a matter of urgency now -but he cannot for the moment get beyond being some kind of wandering labourer who is vaguely Albanian.
He pads the wooden seat as best he can with his coat, closes his eyes and flexes his fingers delicately, imagining strings beneath them. He supported himself as a violinist for a few weeks in Florence, which proved to be a dangerous mistake. He had a brief opportunity to experiment with a dramyin in Tibet. Otherwise he has not been able to touch an instrument in more than two years. The subtle callouses he has carried on the fingertips of his left hand since he was six years old have vanished.
But no one can keep him from playing all of Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage in his skull, if he wants to.
The train begins to move. For the first time in almost fifty hours, he sleeps.
He awakes icy cold and breathless with shock. His violin. Where is it, now? He never left clear instructions about it - what if something has happened to it, what if it has been given away, or sold, or lost - or even if not yet, how long can he trust it will it be kept safe for him, what if he goes home and --
No.
This is nonsensical.
Shivers wrack him. He hugs his coat about him and the wound burns under his sleeve, a point of blazing heat in his frozen body.
It takes far too long for him to observe his fellow passengers and realise that no one else is shivering, no one else is huddling in their coat or shawl; a peasant woman is placidly breastfeeding her infant, not a patch of goose-flesh on either of them.
He turns his head and gazes dully at the greyish countryside rushing past, then rests his head against the dirty window and tries to sleep again. Probably sleep is all he needs. He considers going to the lavatory and examining the lesion on his arm, and decides against it. What good would it do? If he can get as far as Bucharest, it might be safe to consult a doctor, if whatever is wrong with him has not corrected itself by then. Until then, there is nothing he can do.
And he does not want to look, truth be told.
In the end he has to lurch down the aisle to the stinking convenience, and vomit up water and bile. He catches a horrible glimpse of it vanishing down the chute onto the tracks blurring past. He returns as discreetly as he can, having cleaned up as thoroughly as possible. But people are beginning to look at him, despite his best efforts to keep from shifting restlessly in his seat, to clamp his teeth together so they won’t chatter. He does slip in and out of sleep or something like it, and sometimes when he starts awake he has the appalling impression he might have been speaking aloud. Not English, surely, he can’t believe even in his sleep he could be as stupid as that...?
Then there’s another jolt - and owls cry in the darkness. Like muezzin from minarets. He lifts his head, his arm scorching. He’s outside, lying curled on a bench on an empty platform.
He clutches in consternation for his knapsack - he’s probably finished if it has been lost or stolen - but it’s still there, at least. He squints up at a sign hanging from the canopy above the platform, illuminated by a single smokestained lamp. The Cyrillic letters hurt his eyes. The name scarcely matters. He’s at a tiny, deserted country station, in the dark. And he doesn’t need a timetable to know it’s too late for there to be another train to Rousse, or anywhere else he might have chosen to go.
He groans in revulsion at his own idiocy. How can he have done this? How could he strand himself here? He retrieves a slippery memory of stumbling off the train, along with a drove of others; he must have thought the journey was at an end, or perhaps he could no longer stand how that man in the shabby top hat kept staring at him.
His pulse bangs hot and blunt in his arm, he feels little echoes of each impact all the way down to his fingers. He gulps at water from his flask and hopes he’ll keep it down. Then he shuffles over to the lamp post and, at last, agonisingly, eases off his coat, peels back a sleeve damp with sweat.
There is a grotesque bulge in the crook of his arm, scarlet feathering out around it.
He crouches there on the platform in the dim lamplight for a while, immobile as the owls sing.
.
Very gingerly he gets the coat on again, and slings on the knapsack. It’s extraordinary how heavy it is, extraordinary that he has carried around all this weight for so long. He thinks vaguely of opening it, abandoning whatever is not essential - but he’s already plodding down a gravel road, bent under the weight, towards the scattering of lights he can make out ahead, and though it is very difficult to keep going he thinks it would be more difficult still to stop and start again. His feet fall into place, one after each other, as if he really were made of clockwork - a toy, placed on a table, marching jerkily towards the edge.
He has no sense of how long it takes him to reach the small town. Not so very many of these rusting mechanical steps, perhaps, but long enough that at times he’s so sunken in the rhythm of it that there’s nothing else; he has no plan, no past, just the gravel under his feet, the weight on his back, the taut throb in his arm.
He passes walls of rough stone and cottages of whitewashed mud-wattle, into a little square that smells vividly of cattle dung. There are only a few windows lit. He drops onto a doorstep, and sits there, teeth set in an unconscious grimace as he tries to clear his head, while an accordion utters a febrile, babbling moan in the little tavern.
He knows his reluctance to subject himself to the scrutiny of the people inside is absurd.
He drags himself up again and aims his unwieldy steps towards the door of the tavern.
The patrons are a sombre lot, dressed in jackets of undyed brown wool and sheepskin caps, most of them listening to the accordion player in dourly appreciative quiet. A pair of young men at the table near the door are patiently enduring the gloomy philosophising of an older farmhand. The accordionist does not stop playing immediately, but to a man they turn and gaze at the stranger in stolid wariness as soon as he walks in. Their eyes rake over him and he cringes from picturing what they see. He’s still shivering from time to time, deeper, more erratic twitches now. He can feel his damp hair splayed across his forehead. His chest keeps hitching as he breathes. And he can’t muster any persona, any explanation for what he’s doing here, can’t attempt to deploy his meagre stock of Bulgarian. It’s difficult enough even to summon the German to ask if there’s a room available for the night.
Now the musician does stop, and the stranger is the centre of a lugubrious silence. The proprietor stares at him.
“Ein zimmer,” he repeats impatiently, displaying a handful of banknotes.
The man behind the bar slowly shakes his head.
He doesn’t know if the place is genuinely full or if the man simply doesn’t want a sick, hunted-looking vagrant under his roof, no matter how much money he waves about. Usually he would know. And despite himself he sags against the doorframe, his voice dropping to a humiliated mutter as he asks his next question.
Of course they don’t understand. “Arzt,” he says more clearly, and gestures at the hushed town outside the door. Damn it, what is the Bulgarian? “Lekar.”
Doctor.
A number of people attempt to answer this time, gesturing and interrupting each other, and the pain seeps its way into his head as he tries to untangle the strands, even though it’s really not complicated: there is some difference of opinion as to whether he would be better off in Rousse or Svishtov - but there is no doctor here, that is all that signifies.
He closes his eyes again, orders himself to think.
The appalling thing is, he is actually almost relieved. There is a distinct possibility that he has just received a death sentence, yet he can only feel the urgency of vanishing. He can’t stand to be seen like this, he can’t stand to display his arm and show what he’s done - not to a stranger.
He tries to recall what he learned from cases of poisoning, and what he absorbed involuntarily when once upon a time he lived with a doctor.
“Vodka,” he announces peremptorily. The proprietor looks uncertain, shrugs, then reaches for a tiny cracked glass. He starts as the foreigner musters an unexpected spurt of irritable strength, strides across the room to whisk the bottle out of his hands and then slaps his handful of banknotes down on the counter.
“This too,” he commands, handing over his water flask and gesturing until the man gets the idea to take it away and fill it at the pump.
Then he escapes, out of the tavern, beyond the reach of the town’s lights. The night is clear and the lanes are made of pale limestone gravel, dim white trails in the moonlight. He follows the narrowing pale lines across the ground, one step after the other, away into dark fields.
By the time he finds what he’s searching for, he has almost forgotten why he’s looking for it: the low black square of a barn against the sky. He wades through wet grass across the field. The building tilts dramatically, eave bowing to the earth, and inside there’s a heap of wet, rotting hay under the hole in the roof. But near the back, at least, the cold stone floor is dry and sheltered enough.
This is as far as he goes tonight, and thank God for that much.
He crumples without even taking off the knapsack and lies for a while, curled in the blackness, a shapeless, nameless heap among the rubbish. If he dies here, his enemy will never know, will spend the rest of his life half in suspense. The side of his mouth twitches in vague, sardonic satisfaction. Nevertheless, the thought persuades him to sit up and open his knapsack.
He pulls out a box of matches and lights a bull’s-eye lantern, sets it carefully on a stack of bricks. He sweeps and kicks the litter of fallen tiles and rusted farm implements around him out of the way, spreads out a blanket and kneels on it. Clenching his teeth he strips off his coat and lays that down too.
When he has as tidy a work-space as he can manage, he drags out the heaviest thing in his pack, and also the most precious. The portable paraffin stove was invaluable in Tibet, especially in the Tian Shan when they had to melt snow for drinking water. He bought it in Lahul from a disappointed Norwegian explorer, who unwittingly gave him an idea for a new identity.
He assembles the tank, rising tube and top ring with some fumbling difficulty, and lights the gas. He huddles closer to the blue flame, even though he is no longer cold - or at least, not in the same way as before. There remains an icy glaze on his skin, but heat is beginning to brew and simmer underneath it. There isn’t much paraffin left, and he begins to be angry with himself for that, but then winces at the thought of having to lug about any more weight.
His neglect of his medical kit is less excusable. There were various supplies he meant to replace after Tibet -- he lost a bottle of iodine, mostly unused, somewhere in India, and never did anything about it. He has a little gauze, half a roll of bandage, and a box of aspirin - and that is more or less all.
Ah, but the bottles of cocaine and morphine, and the syringe - of course he has been careful to keep them close. He places them neatly, almost ritually, on the pile of bricks, and as the water heats slowly over the gas he sits and watches the the bull’s-eye glinting through the fluid in the bottles -- like liquid starlight, by far the loveliest thing in this wretched place.
He cleans out the syringe with vodka and boiled water, and readies a dose of morphine. Not very much, for he knows his mind is already dappling and swaying, and he can’t risk losing focus entirely. He can’t bring himself to touch his left arm before he has to, so he undoes his trousers, one-handed, and holds the lantern closer to search for a vein in his thigh. Leg or arm, it makes no difference, really, no one is here to see him. But he is here, and for a moment as he lowers the syringe he turns his face away and shuts his eyes --as if he’d developed a sudden and most unlikely fear of needles -- in humiliated revulsion at the spectacle of himself, shivering and sweating with his trousers round his knees. Then he looks down at the stark shadow of the syringe, at how the skin dips under the needle-point.
How many times has he done this to himself? How many times has his skin given way, how many doses of illumination or forgiving darkness have vanished into his blood?
The arithmetic should be simple, but it keeps slipping away from him. He began when he was twenty-one, though not at first with a syringe. He is now thirty-nine. Three or four syringe-fuls of seven percent a month were sufficient, on average, he estimates, for the first five years or so. He had to get by on tiny rations while he was in Tibet, though he began making up for lost time as soon as he was able in Assam. And there were always times - quite long spells - when he could go without entirely, barely think of it. But then, there were also long periods where it took three injections a day to quiet the noise inside.
It has been thousands of times, of course -- thousands of needle-pricks. Almost half his life has been spent with this companion spirit that shares his blood and brain, sparing him part of the extortionate cost of living. Like a fellow-tenant in a set of rooms.
He never promised anyone he would stop. Not even at the worst, not even when it might have saved him. He has always taken a certain stark pride in that; he despises the snuffling vows of his fellow-addicts. It’s over, I swear I’m done with it, I promise I’ll never touch it again. Say you’ll stay.
He has always been more honest than that.
He pushes the needle in now and lets out a reflexive, thousandfold-repeated sigh, even before the relief has yet arrived.
And how many more times, a weary voice within him asks, do you propose to do this? Suppose you survive, suppose you get past this and every air-gun and jack-knife and billy-club that comes at you, do you intend to be sixty, seventy years old and still rolling up your sleeve, driving the needle in among the liver spots, another five or ten thousand punctures to your name?
Not that planning for old age looks like a particularly pressing matter at the moment.
The pain softens and retreats, and some of the hard edges blur out of everything. It’s a relief, though he feels the combined pull of the fever and the drug loosening and fraying what ties still hold him in place, allowing him to drift in the mist. He drags his trousers up, sets about sterilising a razor blade, and he tries to prepare himself. Once again he calls an orchestra into his head and sets it playing. Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage. He tries to hum a strand of the melody from the overture as he bares his arm and sets the point of the blade against the swelling --but the breathy rasp in his own voice unnerves him and he stops.
He presses the blade in and the music blasts away into a scarlet, airless void. The blade has dropped from his fingers into his lap.
It’s a while before he can even look. There’s a little bloody pus seeping over his arm, but he’s barely extended or deepened the wet caldera at the peak of the thing.
He grips his left wrist and hugs his arm against his chest, panting, and he can’t, he can’t continue with this. What is it he is trying to preserve? What is this squalid, hounded, poisoned thing whimpering in this hovel, and what has it to do with the man who walked to meet that beautiful death among the mountains?
Music and morphine are evidently not enough. This once he will pretend, as he never does, as he never, never permits himself, that this is not happening. That none of it has happened and that he isn’t here and isn't alone. He picks up the blade again.
He is too exhausted to conjure anything but his own bed: he gives himself clean sheets, soft pillows. And his friend - in the room, not even touching him. Only his company, that ought to be enough - ought always to have been enough. And his voice, he will allow himself that too.
But the voice that comes with abrupt, relentless clarity is wrong - a perpetual sneer lodged like a thorn in its heart, a hard patina roughened with both real and sham privation, but underneath it always hideously calculating --
I know what is the matter with me. It is a coolie disease from Sumatra -
No, no, why think of that now, after all this time?
Contagious by touch, Watson--that's it, by touch. Keep your distance and all is well.
His eyes squeeze shut again and he jerks his head to the side, as if he can dodge away from what’s inside it. But then at last, what he wanted in the first place-- his friend’s voice, like warm autumn days and polished oak and firelight, and each firm syllable lambent with sympathy and determination:
If you think that I am going to stand here and see you die without either helping you myself or bringing anyone else to help you, then you have mistaken your man.
And that is so horrible that he plunges the blade viciously into the inflamed flesh, and he twists as if turning a key in a lock. And if that isn’t wide or deep enough now there’s nothing he can do about it, his hands are shaking and slippery with sweat, the blade has fallen away somewhere into the dark beyond the lamplight.
He’s made a ragged hole, exuding filth. He grabs for the wad of gauze to catch it, hide it, water leaking from his eyes now as he presses down with his thumb to force more of it out. It looks revolting, and smells it too, though it’s disgust at what he’s reduced himself to, rather than the actual odour, that prompts him to gag.
At last, when there’s nothing left but blood, he flushes the hollow in his flesh with the cooling water, or at least, tries to. He’s not capable of precision now, and there’s still one task left before he’s finished.
He lifts the bottle he purchased in the tavern, grits his teeth and pours the alcohol into the wound.
It’s like tipping an accelerant onto a flame.
The darkness roars. A noise drags itself from his throat like a rope through a hawsepipe. He falls back onto the blanket. And gasps a name and goes on falling.
It’s not water but fire that pours now from the cataract between the mountains; it’s fire that crashes down into the abyss below, hangs in drifting curtains of sparks in the air. But the noise is the always the same, that unending, furious, desolate howl.
His right hand grasps the blanket beneath him and he clings on with all his strength, he forces his eyes open. The paraffin gives out. The lantern casts rearing, quivering shadows in the corners of the barn.
He breathes, “John.”
Other names begin to pulse through his head, like a dreadful song. Who did he say he was, last time, in Constantinople?
Guillaume Ferier. Johannes Reinhardt. Hans Sigerson.
Holmes, his friend calls, despairing, into the depths.
He floats, tumbles through the blazing spray, endlessly downward, never any nearer the bottom.
I’m still here, he replies in a whisper, into the roar of the burning falls. I’ve always been still here.
END
Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage.
I really can't overstate my incredulity at how long this has taken (or just how long it IS , I thought it might be a FICLET, HA. ) but here I am back at last and this... this technically isn't the next part of Antidote to Sorrow. (3rd person POV and present tense ZOMG!) But! Although this is a freestander, and can be read without any reference to Antidote, it still is part of the same story. I saw this prompt on the meme and was all, “Oooh... that could be that thing that happens in the backstory -- maybe it would be nice if we see that happen, instead of just having people talk about it later...”)
So. If you are reading Antidote to Sorrow, events herein are taking place between chapters 1 and 2 and if not... everything should be self-explanatory.
Summary: A tall, thin, grey-eyed foreigner, running for his life.
Warnings: Drugs, self-inflicted gruesomeness.
Canon stories: DYIN, FINA, EMPT
6,700 words.
Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage
It has always been a matter of necessity.
A man who can speak nine languages - French like a native, German and Italian well enough to fool anyone who is neither German or Italian - a man who can read danger from a scrape on a wall or the twitch of a hand - a man who can simply, when it comes to it, run very fast, has certain advantages when in exile.
They are not, however, limitless.
He can contort his face and his body for hours but not weeks at a time. One cannot paint one’s skin with walnut juice or attach false eyebrows every morning while trekking across the Tian Shan in the company of a pair of Hindoo monks. And there is the colour of his eyes, which he would give a great deal to be able to alter.
He has been an explorer, a chemist, a musician, a spy. He can be almost anything - except, he has discovered, unremarkable. He has worn more names and been more people than he can bear to recall (Guillaume Ferier. Johannes Reinhardt. Hans Sigerson) but each one of them, quite against his intentions, has turned out to be in some way singular. They cannot exist at any length before they begin to be talked of, these tall, pale-eyed, wandering foreigners with their peculiar talents and bad habit of committing exploits that get into the papers. He even apprehended a murderer in Jaipur and prevented a kidnapping in Samarkand - hardly wise acts in terms of self-preservation, but what else was he to do?
So it is not particularly surprising when he realises he is being followed again. He has just drained his last sweet, smoky coffee of the evening and risen from his seat outside a kıraathane on Galata Bridge. He walks south towards Eminonu while the voices of the muezzin float out across the city and the last evening light scatters in flakes of iron and gold over the Bosphorus. And there are two local thugs lumbering along behind him, as subtle as pair of charging elephants -- they are far too close, they try to shuffle into a shop doorway when he turns his head and he can smell the hashish on them from twenty yards away. It is so crudely done that if this were London, he might be amused, or perhaps a little insulted.
As it is, he cannot help his eyelids sinking shut in protest as he walks, and for an instant his mouth fills with the weight of an unsounded groan. He knew he was taking a risk in working so close to the British Consulate, (though there were advantages to that too)but he is just one of several eccentric European nomads who circulate around and through Constantinople’s Imperial Museum. In his two months in the small office behind the Mesopotamian exhibit, he has done nothing more outlandish than quietly translate reports from a German excavation team working on Sumerian ruins in Nippur. He had hoped for longer.
He gains the south side of the Golden Horn and sheds his pursuers without difficulty in the Bazaar. The mild stimulus of the coffee drops away along with the adrenaline and he leans against the rough stone of the Roman aqueduct, passing a hand over his face. Is it possible they were not working for anyone, that it was only his wallet they were after? For surely they can have no idea whom they were tracking so clumsily . . .
Well, he is practised at finding the answers to such questions: now to work. He waits for the decision to whittle him down to a sharp, clean point, for every extraneous, fallible part of himself to be pared away. It always happens.
They would not have troubled to follow him had they known where he sleeps. So - provided he observes the usual precautions -- he can return to his room above the saucepan shop in the han, but he will not assume it is safe to stay there. (The one safe assumption, he has found, is usually that it is not safe to stay anywhere). He takes such a long, stealthy, circuitous route back to the sooty square that it is dark by the time he reaches it. But he makes no effort not to be seen entering; as he climbs the steps to the gallery that frames the courtyard and its dry fountain, he even catches the eye of one of the Persian traders staying in a neighbouring room, and smiles - which is more or less unprecedented.
He is scarcely inside his white-washed room for two minutes, long enough to remove his jacket and sweep his hair out of the fussy centre parting, fold away the pair of small round spectacles of the prim, harmless scholar he has been here. He does not look at the narrow flock-bed on the floor. It was heaving with lice when he first arrived, but he fumigated the place with a reeking chemical concoction of his own, to the consternation of the neighbours - and it can’t be that word of that has got out, can it? His knapsack is always packed and near the door; this time, however, he lowers it out of the window into the dirty yard behind the saucepan shop, and climbs deftly down after it. He has left a lamp burning within; if anyone does trace him to this room tonight, he is happy for them to suppose it occupied.
He turns into the maze of lanes behind the Spice Bazaar. A couple are engaged in a furious argument in an upstairs room, the shutters are open and there’s enough light for him to complete his preparations in the alley below. He assembles a thickset, heavily whiskered Greek merchant seaman, who stands a few aching inches shorter than his own height, and sets out.
He searches for his enemies by searching for himself. He hunts a phantom, fugitive Englishman through Constantinople and watches for any fellow-travellers along the way. First he crosses back across the bridge to Pera, and the large European hotels there. There has been a break-in at the Hotel de Byzance, and someone other than the clerk has been thumbing through the ledger at Misseri’s, though the fact that he can smell hashish again is hardly conclusive.
The Greek sailor ambles in and out of the taverns on Cadde-i Kebir, chatting to tourists, and harassing merchants in heavily accented Turkish or English about a friend; tall, thin; black hair and grey eyes; a long beaky nose, a clever fellow; speaks a lot of languages, and no one’s eyes narrow in recognition or suspicion, no one demands to know why everyone is asking after gangling polyglots tonight, and this is a city of a million souls, after all -- perhaps all this is unnecessary, perhaps the men on Galata Bridge were only thieves, and he could return to the bare room and the narrow flock bed in the han. He feels as if he could sleep tonight, plunge deep down and never break the surface until morning, although it has been a very long time since any such thing has happened.
He spends the last of the night sitting in the Martyrs’ Cemetery, his back to a cypress tree, smoking as the stars fade. Perhaps he does sleep, a few grey, drifting minutes out of each hour. The cemetery’s many dogs go off into rounds of barking every half hour or so, which he does not resent, it is as well to be kept on his guard. Certainly he is already awake when the pale minarets of Fatih Mosque begin to emerge out of the darkness, and the first call to prayer sounds.
He heads to the Imperial Museum as early as he dares.
“I heard someone I know might be working here,” he begins, and again lists all the qualities his selves have, regrettably, had in common.
The doorman is immaculate in crisp manila uniform and well-brushed fez. “Not another of you,” he says, raising impressive eyebrows. “I told your friend yesterday; Herr Amiel isn’t in, and what he has to do with the likes of you I can’t imagine.”
The Greek sailor nods expressionlessly and turns away.
He has kept Herr Amiel’s round glasses in his pocket all this time. He leaves them on the balustrade of Galata Bridge, on the absurd idea that perhaps they may be of use to somebody else. He plucks off the Greek sailor’s whiskers, and less because it might be distinctive than because he suddenly can’t bear it on his face any longer, he shaves off a small straight moustache in one of the public conveniences by a mosque. Now he is neither the Greek sailor nor the Austrian scholar, he is no one in particular. A dangerous state, a grey primer onto which he will, again, have to paint an entirely new life.
And something within him moans, I can’t. His lips purse briefly in irritation as he submerges himself in a rush hour crowd, hurrying onto a ferry across the Bosphorus. He can. Of course he can.
But how many more times, how many more names, how many more years, before he reaches the end of this?
He has memorised the train timetables of every city in which he has spent more than a single night and some into which he has never yet set foot. He has a few hours to get through in Constantinople yet, and he passes some of them simply hiding among the almond trees in the little park behind the tobacco warehouse, some down in the market by Scutari’s docks, where he buys provisions for the journey, though he finds it difficult to imagine eating them. His shoulders are beginning to ache already under the weight of his knapsack.
He waits until just minutes before the train for Angora is due to leave, then walks into Haidar Pasha station, stands at his full height in the queue and lets an English accent swagger its way to the front of his voice as he purchases a ticket. He wishes to be noticed, doing this, and it works: the man he observed leaning against a pillar near the gates, watching the passengers come and go - the one who looked at him suspiciously as he came in and who carries a cosh of some kind under his jacket - is now very interested indeed, interested enough to move swiftly after him towards the platform. But he is waylaid by a pair of ticket inspectors - and why didn’t the fool simply equip himself with a set of tickets for various trains earlier? - and his quarry steps onto the Angora train without giving any sign of having noticed him at all.
He moves down the train until he is level with a signal box on the platform opposite, and climbs out onto the tracks. He darts across the rails, scrambles up behind the box and into the cover of a few blackened trees. A child sitting aboard the Angora train has witnessed this and is staring out at him, open-mouthed, and starts dragging at his mother’s sleeve and pointing but the dullard pursing him has not seen him and breaks through onto the platform in time to scowl after the Angora train as it steams away.
Briefly, the fugitive smiles to himself as he swings himself up over a wall and into a scrubby little no-man’s-land of discarded cable-reels and rotten sleepers.
The almost-English syllables he spoke at the ticket-office linger on his tongue like an after-taste. All this time he has so rarely heard his own unmodulated voice, except in those rare, desperate solitary occasions when he has caught himself speaking aloud in a breathless undertone, and even then he does not sound particularly like himself. Even in his head, English is stifled and squeezed between so many other languages: he always said a brain contains limited storage space. Sometimes he finds that English words have gone missing, leaving behind horrible, itching little patches of nothing. Once in Lhasa he suffered twenty disconcerting minutes unable to recall the word relinquish. He had to go through the bizarre process of translating from Tibetan to Latin before he could find it.
Perhaps he should be English again soon. Perhaps after all this time it would be a suitably unexpected tactic.
The idea dies a swift natural death.
Down at the docks beside the station, he crams himself into a shadowed space between a workshop wall and a stack of pallets, and spends almost two hours waiting, observing the stevedores as they load the freighters. As one o’clock passes, the undulating web of calling voices strings itself between the cities’ minarets again, and the men stop work, flex aching necks and shoulders, and troop over to a standpipe to wash their hands and heads for prayer. Keeping low, he darts across the wharf and ducks nto the cover of a pile of sacks. The workers group over in the forecourt of a warehouse and turn to face the East. And he moves again, as they dip their faces towards the ground. He has no time to make it aboard the steam-ship he has chosen, but as he hoped, they do not immediately resume work. He is crouched behind a row of barrels of chromate of iron, as some open packs of flatbread and cheese and anchovies, others go to greet wives and children approaching with baskets of köfte and fried vegetables.
He races up the ramp, and down into the lower hold.
It is pitch black down here, and soon it grows stickily, airlessly hot - he is close to the ship’s boilers. Still, he feels his pulse settle gratefully into a slower rhythm when he hears the engine begin to wheeze and pound and feels the ship move at last, out into the Black Sea.
He spends nine, ten stifling hours there in the dark, always awake. Somewhere around midnight he creeps out, past the men shovelling coal into the furnace, onto deck, and gasps with relief at the cool air. He won’t return to the hold, not merely because it’s uncomfortable but because he needs to be poised to get ashore quickly when they reach Varna, and he has certain preparations to make. It is likely to be even more difficult getting off this ship unobserved than it was getting on.
There is a fan-shaped space behind the deckhouse; there are a couple of crates here and a tarpaulin he can use for cover, when it gets light again. As he sits down cross-legged his eyes catch on the rivets on the panelling beside him, and it strikes him poignantly that this ship is British-made. She is twenty years old, or thereabouts. He was at Oxford, perhaps, while she steamed out for the first time from Portsmouth or Hampton-on-Thames.
He does not want to think about Oxford, or any part of his own past.
He thinks instead about the state and colour of the paint, and estimates the Ottoman Maritime Company purchased her about three years ago. Her name has been changed, which he believes he heard somewhere was unlucky. He catches himself foolishly stroking a hand over the steelwork.
He is not sure if the blackness pulling at him deserves the name of sleep, but whatever it is, he can’t give way to it here. He had no serious difficulty in evading the attention of the man standing lookout on the fo’csle head as he came out onto deck, but he must remain alert. If he is caught he will either be clapped in jail as soon as they make landfall, or carried back to Constantinople, and either eventuality will shorten his odds considerably.
It is wholly essential then, entirely a matter of necessity, that he set out his supplies on the deck in front of him, and try to find a vein by moonlight.
He has no better travelling case for this syringe than the cardboard box it came in, and it has half fallen out inside his pack, though it is thankfully unbroken. He is as careful as he can be in the circumstances; he always puts it away clean, and he sluices it with water from his flask before opening the cocaine-bottle and drawing a load of bright fluid into the chamber, like a crystal bullet. With his back against the deckhouse, he slides the needle in.
And the point goes too deep, goes through -- hurts more than it should.
He flinches, repositions, pushes the plunger home.
Wakefulness shrills down his nerves. The stars seethe.
The sea grows rougher as they approach Bulgaria, and Varna’s shore, bristling with loading cranes, looks bleak and hostile in the sullen dawn light. He cannot make any elaborate adjustments to his appearance, but he jams a cap low on his brow, shoves his knapsack into a burlap sack and shoulders it, and hopes the Bulgarian dockhands will take him for one of the Turkish crew, and vice versa.
He picks his moment and saunters down the ramp. He gets the solid quayside under his feet with a tiny glow of triumph.
Then there’s a shout. Without looking back, he breaks into a run. He knows abstractly that after all he’s demanded of his body recently, it is not surprising that he’s not as fast as usual - it is not strange if the men are gaining on him. Nevertheless he is surprised, he labours for breath, and to push his muscles harder, and he can’t quite take in that it isn’t easier.
He scrambles over a gate, sprints down a muddy alley, collapses behind a wall and lies panting against his knapsack, struggling to get his breath back. For what feels like a long time, he can’t.
He forces himself back to his feet and hoists his pack onto his shoulders. And as the strap passes over his left arm, pain ignites there, as if the strap has snagged on a splinter of shrapnel lodged in his flesh, and he buckles helplessly back against the wall with a gasp.
Another struggle to steady his breathing. He puts the knapsack down, draws his arm gingerly out of his coat, and rolls up his shirtsleeve.
The puncture in the crook of his arm looks far too small to have hurt so badly. It is wet and a little raised, an angry pink flaring around it.
He stares at it for a second.
He cannot stay in Varna. His subterfuge at Constantinople will not deflect his enemies towards Angora indefinitely; Varna is too obvious an alternative destination. Besides, he has been here before, and encountered trouble. The first train for Rousse is leaving in an hour and he must be on it.
He rolls down his sleeve.
He cleans himself up a little at the station, and at last slumps gratefully onto a third class seat. He can afford no better for the moment - he has almost fifty pounds stowed away in his knapsack, but only a little of it is in Bulgarian lev, and he does not wish to startle the ticket officer with foreign currency. He manages to complete the exchange in noncommittal monosyllables. Constructing a new identity is becoming a matter of urgency now -but he cannot for the moment get beyond being some kind of wandering labourer who is vaguely Albanian.
He pads the wooden seat as best he can with his coat, closes his eyes and flexes his fingers delicately, imagining strings beneath them. He supported himself as a violinist for a few weeks in Florence, which proved to be a dangerous mistake. He had a brief opportunity to experiment with a dramyin in Tibet. Otherwise he has not been able to touch an instrument in more than two years. The subtle callouses he has carried on the fingertips of his left hand since he was six years old have vanished.
But no one can keep him from playing all of Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage in his skull, if he wants to.
The train begins to move. For the first time in almost fifty hours, he sleeps.
He awakes icy cold and breathless with shock. His violin. Where is it, now? He never left clear instructions about it - what if something has happened to it, what if it has been given away, or sold, or lost - or even if not yet, how long can he trust it will it be kept safe for him, what if he goes home and --
No.
This is nonsensical.
Shivers wrack him. He hugs his coat about him and the wound burns under his sleeve, a point of blazing heat in his frozen body.
It takes far too long for him to observe his fellow passengers and realise that no one else is shivering, no one else is huddling in their coat or shawl; a peasant woman is placidly breastfeeding her infant, not a patch of goose-flesh on either of them.
He turns his head and gazes dully at the greyish countryside rushing past, then rests his head against the dirty window and tries to sleep again. Probably sleep is all he needs. He considers going to the lavatory and examining the lesion on his arm, and decides against it. What good would it do? If he can get as far as Bucharest, it might be safe to consult a doctor, if whatever is wrong with him has not corrected itself by then. Until then, there is nothing he can do.
And he does not want to look, truth be told.
In the end he has to lurch down the aisle to the stinking convenience, and vomit up water and bile. He catches a horrible glimpse of it vanishing down the chute onto the tracks blurring past. He returns as discreetly as he can, having cleaned up as thoroughly as possible. But people are beginning to look at him, despite his best efforts to keep from shifting restlessly in his seat, to clamp his teeth together so they won’t chatter. He does slip in and out of sleep or something like it, and sometimes when he starts awake he has the appalling impression he might have been speaking aloud. Not English, surely, he can’t believe even in his sleep he could be as stupid as that...?
Then there’s another jolt - and owls cry in the darkness. Like muezzin from minarets. He lifts his head, his arm scorching. He’s outside, lying curled on a bench on an empty platform.
He clutches in consternation for his knapsack - he’s probably finished if it has been lost or stolen - but it’s still there, at least. He squints up at a sign hanging from the canopy above the platform, illuminated by a single smokestained lamp. The Cyrillic letters hurt his eyes. The name scarcely matters. He’s at a tiny, deserted country station, in the dark. And he doesn’t need a timetable to know it’s too late for there to be another train to Rousse, or anywhere else he might have chosen to go.
He groans in revulsion at his own idiocy. How can he have done this? How could he strand himself here? He retrieves a slippery memory of stumbling off the train, along with a drove of others; he must have thought the journey was at an end, or perhaps he could no longer stand how that man in the shabby top hat kept staring at him.
His pulse bangs hot and blunt in his arm, he feels little echoes of each impact all the way down to his fingers. He gulps at water from his flask and hopes he’ll keep it down. Then he shuffles over to the lamp post and, at last, agonisingly, eases off his coat, peels back a sleeve damp with sweat.
There is a grotesque bulge in the crook of his arm, scarlet feathering out around it.
He crouches there on the platform in the dim lamplight for a while, immobile as the owls sing.
.
Very gingerly he gets the coat on again, and slings on the knapsack. It’s extraordinary how heavy it is, extraordinary that he has carried around all this weight for so long. He thinks vaguely of opening it, abandoning whatever is not essential - but he’s already plodding down a gravel road, bent under the weight, towards the scattering of lights he can make out ahead, and though it is very difficult to keep going he thinks it would be more difficult still to stop and start again. His feet fall into place, one after each other, as if he really were made of clockwork - a toy, placed on a table, marching jerkily towards the edge.
He has no sense of how long it takes him to reach the small town. Not so very many of these rusting mechanical steps, perhaps, but long enough that at times he’s so sunken in the rhythm of it that there’s nothing else; he has no plan, no past, just the gravel under his feet, the weight on his back, the taut throb in his arm.
He passes walls of rough stone and cottages of whitewashed mud-wattle, into a little square that smells vividly of cattle dung. There are only a few windows lit. He drops onto a doorstep, and sits there, teeth set in an unconscious grimace as he tries to clear his head, while an accordion utters a febrile, babbling moan in the little tavern.
He knows his reluctance to subject himself to the scrutiny of the people inside is absurd.
He drags himself up again and aims his unwieldy steps towards the door of the tavern.
The patrons are a sombre lot, dressed in jackets of undyed brown wool and sheepskin caps, most of them listening to the accordion player in dourly appreciative quiet. A pair of young men at the table near the door are patiently enduring the gloomy philosophising of an older farmhand. The accordionist does not stop playing immediately, but to a man they turn and gaze at the stranger in stolid wariness as soon as he walks in. Their eyes rake over him and he cringes from picturing what they see. He’s still shivering from time to time, deeper, more erratic twitches now. He can feel his damp hair splayed across his forehead. His chest keeps hitching as he breathes. And he can’t muster any persona, any explanation for what he’s doing here, can’t attempt to deploy his meagre stock of Bulgarian. It’s difficult enough even to summon the German to ask if there’s a room available for the night.
Now the musician does stop, and the stranger is the centre of a lugubrious silence. The proprietor stares at him.
“Ein zimmer,” he repeats impatiently, displaying a handful of banknotes.
The man behind the bar slowly shakes his head.
He doesn’t know if the place is genuinely full or if the man simply doesn’t want a sick, hunted-looking vagrant under his roof, no matter how much money he waves about. Usually he would know. And despite himself he sags against the doorframe, his voice dropping to a humiliated mutter as he asks his next question.
Of course they don’t understand. “Arzt,” he says more clearly, and gestures at the hushed town outside the door. Damn it, what is the Bulgarian? “Lekar.”
Doctor.
A number of people attempt to answer this time, gesturing and interrupting each other, and the pain seeps its way into his head as he tries to untangle the strands, even though it’s really not complicated: there is some difference of opinion as to whether he would be better off in Rousse or Svishtov - but there is no doctor here, that is all that signifies.
He closes his eyes again, orders himself to think.
The appalling thing is, he is actually almost relieved. There is a distinct possibility that he has just received a death sentence, yet he can only feel the urgency of vanishing. He can’t stand to be seen like this, he can’t stand to display his arm and show what he’s done - not to a stranger.
He tries to recall what he learned from cases of poisoning, and what he absorbed involuntarily when once upon a time he lived with a doctor.
“Vodka,” he announces peremptorily. The proprietor looks uncertain, shrugs, then reaches for a tiny cracked glass. He starts as the foreigner musters an unexpected spurt of irritable strength, strides across the room to whisk the bottle out of his hands and then slaps his handful of banknotes down on the counter.
“This too,” he commands, handing over his water flask and gesturing until the man gets the idea to take it away and fill it at the pump.
Then he escapes, out of the tavern, beyond the reach of the town’s lights. The night is clear and the lanes are made of pale limestone gravel, dim white trails in the moonlight. He follows the narrowing pale lines across the ground, one step after the other, away into dark fields.
By the time he finds what he’s searching for, he has almost forgotten why he’s looking for it: the low black square of a barn against the sky. He wades through wet grass across the field. The building tilts dramatically, eave bowing to the earth, and inside there’s a heap of wet, rotting hay under the hole in the roof. But near the back, at least, the cold stone floor is dry and sheltered enough.
This is as far as he goes tonight, and thank God for that much.
He crumples without even taking off the knapsack and lies for a while, curled in the blackness, a shapeless, nameless heap among the rubbish. If he dies here, his enemy will never know, will spend the rest of his life half in suspense. The side of his mouth twitches in vague, sardonic satisfaction. Nevertheless, the thought persuades him to sit up and open his knapsack.
He pulls out a box of matches and lights a bull’s-eye lantern, sets it carefully on a stack of bricks. He sweeps and kicks the litter of fallen tiles and rusted farm implements around him out of the way, spreads out a blanket and kneels on it. Clenching his teeth he strips off his coat and lays that down too.
When he has as tidy a work-space as he can manage, he drags out the heaviest thing in his pack, and also the most precious. The portable paraffin stove was invaluable in Tibet, especially in the Tian Shan when they had to melt snow for drinking water. He bought it in Lahul from a disappointed Norwegian explorer, who unwittingly gave him an idea for a new identity.
He assembles the tank, rising tube and top ring with some fumbling difficulty, and lights the gas. He huddles closer to the blue flame, even though he is no longer cold - or at least, not in the same way as before. There remains an icy glaze on his skin, but heat is beginning to brew and simmer underneath it. There isn’t much paraffin left, and he begins to be angry with himself for that, but then winces at the thought of having to lug about any more weight.
His neglect of his medical kit is less excusable. There were various supplies he meant to replace after Tibet -- he lost a bottle of iodine, mostly unused, somewhere in India, and never did anything about it. He has a little gauze, half a roll of bandage, and a box of aspirin - and that is more or less all.
Ah, but the bottles of cocaine and morphine, and the syringe - of course he has been careful to keep them close. He places them neatly, almost ritually, on the pile of bricks, and as the water heats slowly over the gas he sits and watches the the bull’s-eye glinting through the fluid in the bottles -- like liquid starlight, by far the loveliest thing in this wretched place.
He cleans out the syringe with vodka and boiled water, and readies a dose of morphine. Not very much, for he knows his mind is already dappling and swaying, and he can’t risk losing focus entirely. He can’t bring himself to touch his left arm before he has to, so he undoes his trousers, one-handed, and holds the lantern closer to search for a vein in his thigh. Leg or arm, it makes no difference, really, no one is here to see him. But he is here, and for a moment as he lowers the syringe he turns his face away and shuts his eyes --as if he’d developed a sudden and most unlikely fear of needles -- in humiliated revulsion at the spectacle of himself, shivering and sweating with his trousers round his knees. Then he looks down at the stark shadow of the syringe, at how the skin dips under the needle-point.
How many times has he done this to himself? How many times has his skin given way, how many doses of illumination or forgiving darkness have vanished into his blood?
The arithmetic should be simple, but it keeps slipping away from him. He began when he was twenty-one, though not at first with a syringe. He is now thirty-nine. Three or four syringe-fuls of seven percent a month were sufficient, on average, he estimates, for the first five years or so. He had to get by on tiny rations while he was in Tibet, though he began making up for lost time as soon as he was able in Assam. And there were always times - quite long spells - when he could go without entirely, barely think of it. But then, there were also long periods where it took three injections a day to quiet the noise inside.
It has been thousands of times, of course -- thousands of needle-pricks. Almost half his life has been spent with this companion spirit that shares his blood and brain, sparing him part of the extortionate cost of living. Like a fellow-tenant in a set of rooms.
He never promised anyone he would stop. Not even at the worst, not even when it might have saved him. He has always taken a certain stark pride in that; he despises the snuffling vows of his fellow-addicts. It’s over, I swear I’m done with it, I promise I’ll never touch it again. Say you’ll stay.
He has always been more honest than that.
He pushes the needle in now and lets out a reflexive, thousandfold-repeated sigh, even before the relief has yet arrived.
And how many more times, a weary voice within him asks, do you propose to do this? Suppose you survive, suppose you get past this and every air-gun and jack-knife and billy-club that comes at you, do you intend to be sixty, seventy years old and still rolling up your sleeve, driving the needle in among the liver spots, another five or ten thousand punctures to your name?
Not that planning for old age looks like a particularly pressing matter at the moment.
The pain softens and retreats, and some of the hard edges blur out of everything. It’s a relief, though he feels the combined pull of the fever and the drug loosening and fraying what ties still hold him in place, allowing him to drift in the mist. He drags his trousers up, sets about sterilising a razor blade, and he tries to prepare himself. Once again he calls an orchestra into his head and sets it playing. Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage. He tries to hum a strand of the melody from the overture as he bares his arm and sets the point of the blade against the swelling --but the breathy rasp in his own voice unnerves him and he stops.
He presses the blade in and the music blasts away into a scarlet, airless void. The blade has dropped from his fingers into his lap.
It’s a while before he can even look. There’s a little bloody pus seeping over his arm, but he’s barely extended or deepened the wet caldera at the peak of the thing.
He grips his left wrist and hugs his arm against his chest, panting, and he can’t, he can’t continue with this. What is it he is trying to preserve? What is this squalid, hounded, poisoned thing whimpering in this hovel, and what has it to do with the man who walked to meet that beautiful death among the mountains?
Music and morphine are evidently not enough. This once he will pretend, as he never does, as he never, never permits himself, that this is not happening. That none of it has happened and that he isn’t here and isn't alone. He picks up the blade again.
He is too exhausted to conjure anything but his own bed: he gives himself clean sheets, soft pillows. And his friend - in the room, not even touching him. Only his company, that ought to be enough - ought always to have been enough. And his voice, he will allow himself that too.
But the voice that comes with abrupt, relentless clarity is wrong - a perpetual sneer lodged like a thorn in its heart, a hard patina roughened with both real and sham privation, but underneath it always hideously calculating --
I know what is the matter with me. It is a coolie disease from Sumatra -
No, no, why think of that now, after all this time?
Contagious by touch, Watson--that's it, by touch. Keep your distance and all is well.
His eyes squeeze shut again and he jerks his head to the side, as if he can dodge away from what’s inside it. But then at last, what he wanted in the first place-- his friend’s voice, like warm autumn days and polished oak and firelight, and each firm syllable lambent with sympathy and determination:
If you think that I am going to stand here and see you die without either helping you myself or bringing anyone else to help you, then you have mistaken your man.
And that is so horrible that he plunges the blade viciously into the inflamed flesh, and he twists as if turning a key in a lock. And if that isn’t wide or deep enough now there’s nothing he can do about it, his hands are shaking and slippery with sweat, the blade has fallen away somewhere into the dark beyond the lamplight.
He’s made a ragged hole, exuding filth. He grabs for the wad of gauze to catch it, hide it, water leaking from his eyes now as he presses down with his thumb to force more of it out. It looks revolting, and smells it too, though it’s disgust at what he’s reduced himself to, rather than the actual odour, that prompts him to gag.
At last, when there’s nothing left but blood, he flushes the hollow in his flesh with the cooling water, or at least, tries to. He’s not capable of precision now, and there’s still one task left before he’s finished.
He lifts the bottle he purchased in the tavern, grits his teeth and pours the alcohol into the wound.
It’s like tipping an accelerant onto a flame.
The darkness roars. A noise drags itself from his throat like a rope through a hawsepipe. He falls back onto the blanket. And gasps a name and goes on falling.
It’s not water but fire that pours now from the cataract between the mountains; it’s fire that crashes down into the abyss below, hangs in drifting curtains of sparks in the air. But the noise is the always the same, that unending, furious, desolate howl.
His right hand grasps the blanket beneath him and he clings on with all his strength, he forces his eyes open. The paraffin gives out. The lantern casts rearing, quivering shadows in the corners of the barn.
He breathes, “John.”
Other names begin to pulse through his head, like a dreadful song. Who did he say he was, last time, in Constantinople?
Guillaume Ferier. Johannes Reinhardt. Hans Sigerson.
Holmes, his friend calls, despairing, into the depths.
He floats, tumbles through the blazing spray, endlessly downward, never any nearer the bottom.
I’m still here, he replies in a whisper, into the roar of the burning falls. I’ve always been still here.
END
Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage.