John Langan - The Fisherman

Around him, the air snaps with the crack of his companions’ axes connecting with these strange ropes. A rapid-fire burst of Italian that’s probably a prayer bursts from Angelo’s lips as his axe flies up from the rope it’s struck. The recoil flings Andrea’s axe out of his hands, over his head, and onto the ground behind him. Only Italo succeeds in maintaining something like a regular rhythm, though the sweat already soaking the back of his shirt testifies to the effort it’s costing him. Jacob adjusts his grip and raises his axe.

Throughout all this, which hasn’t taken more than a minute or two, the Fisherman has remained in place, watching the five of them. When Jacob is three difficult strokes into his task, the Fisherman leaves his spot beside the great bull’s carcass and walks toward the stream. He still has hold of that knife, though he carries it almost casually. Jacob doesn’t care for the sight of him approaching the frothing water, doesn’t like the deliberation with which the man kneels beside it and plunges the bloody knife down into it, but Rainer hasn’t told him to stop chopping, so he delivers a fourth and a fifth blow to the rope. He is making progress. The dense strands that compose the rope are separating, however reluctantly. As each does, he’s aware of something escaping from it, a force that eddies in the air around him, stirring the hairs on his arms, the back of his neck.

The Fisherman remains bent at the stream, the knife and the hand holding it underwater, for a long time, enough for Jacob to have cut almost halfway through his rope, Italo three-quarters of the way through his. Jacob has been expecting Rainer to approach the man, confront him, but it’s only as he’s rising from the stream and turning to them that Rainer strides past Jacob. From his efforts, Jacob is drenched in sweat. Sweat matts his hair to his head, streams down his forehead, runs into his eyes, blurring his vision. For this reason, he isn’t sure whether, when he sees the water clinging to the Fisherman’s arm, from his elbow to the tip of his knife, as if he’s wearing it, his eyes are playing tricks on him. The Fisherman snaps his arm, as if he were cracking a whip, and the water rushes to the knife, gathering around it in a globe. Rainer breaks into a run, and it’s this that convinces Jacob his eyesight is fine. A flick of the wrist, and the ball of water surrounding the Fisherman’s knife elongates, lancing at Italo, who’s holding his axe above his head, ready for the next cut. Before the water-spear can reach him, Rainer’s at his side, his right hand holding his axe marked side forward, his left making a sweeping motion outward. Like a snake sliding around a rock, the water curves away from Italo and Rainer. Instead, it targets Angelo.

Jacob is close enough to him to mark the exact location the water strikes, the hollow at the base of the throat, and to hear the sound it makes as it punctures the skin and streams into the wound, the whoosh of water descending a drain. Angelo goes rigid, his mouth gaping, his eyes bulging, while the water invades him. Andrea shouts, “Angelo!” Jacob knows he should do something, but it’s as if his arms and legs have locked. Before movement has returned to them, the tail end of the water-spear has left the Fisherman’s blade and vanished into the wound in Angelo’s throat.

His axe gripped near the end with both hands, Rainer advances on the Fisherman, who half-crouches, as if weighing another plunge of his hand into the stream. Italo resumes chopping through his rope. Angelo turns to face Jacob. He moves stiffly, as if the water that’s entered the hole in his throat has swollen his joints. A sheen of what appears to be sweat shines on Angelo’s face, his hands — the Fisherman’s water, Jacob realizes, seeping out Angelo’s pores. As if he’s crying uncontrollably, Angelo’s eyes shimmer. Beneath the water, they’re gold. Jacob groans, and as if in response to his displeasure, Angelo coughs. It’s a rough, wet noise, the sound of a man trying to clear his lungs of the water that’s drowning them. Little spouts of water splash from the wound in his throat as the cough goes on and on and on, bending Angelo over with its force.

Within each liquid bark, Jacob hears something else, what might almost be a word, words. There’s a language forcing itself out of Angelo, a harsh assemblage of phlegmy coughs, grunts, and clicks of the tongue that Jacob nonetheless understands. It’s not so much that he can translate individual words as it is that he can see their subject. More than see — for an instant, it’s as if he’s inside what’s being described. One moment, he’s hovering airplane-high in the air, so far up the coastline below him might be the kind of oversized map you sometimes encounter on the floors of museums. He doesn’t recognize the contours of the shore, but he already knows the black ocean, as he knows that the humps rising from it, parallel to the coast, aren’t islands, but more of the great beast he’s watched shift its back in front of him, Rainer’s Leviathan. And this might well be the Biblical personage, because it continues along the shore in both directions, to the limit of Jacob’s view. From points up and down the coast, a lattice of fine lines stretches to the water, some of them ending at one of the enormous humps, others plunging beneath the waves. The Fisherman has done this, Jacob understands. Working over a length of time Jacob does not even want to consider, the man with the lank hair and scraggly beard has cast his lines and lodged his hooks into the bulk of this immensity with a patience that’s equal measures mad and heroic. He has brought this monster, this god-beast, to the brink of complete capture, and while doing so must be a trespass of a fundamental order, Jacob cannot help himself from admiring the man.

With unnerving speed, the scene beneath begins to draw closer. Though he can feel his feet planted on the ground, Jacob has the sensation of dropping from a great height, like a bird who’s lost the use of his wings. Wind pushes against him as the ground gains in definition. Through eyelids squinted almost shut, he sees that the ropes directly below him are also fastened to the remains of giant trees. His ears fill with roaring, the sound of the air he’s plummeting through. It is absurd — his feet rest firmly on the red soil. He hears Angelo expelling the jagged language from a throat that must be raw from it. He is standing listening to Angelo, and he is dropping towards a tree stump the width of a field, and when he strikes that expanse of blond wood, Jacob knows he will fall over, dead. He closes his eyes, but it makes no difference. The tree stump fills his vision, a wooden plane. He sees that the rope tied around it has been painted with symbols, angular markings midway between pictures and letters. They appear to float above the fibers. What a peculiar detail, he thinks, to accompany him out of this life.

Somewhere in front of him, there’s an explosion of sound, sounds, a train of them slamming one into the other. A drawn-out yell collides with the thud of one body crashing into another, which smashes into Angelo’s weird speech, which breaks into random coughing. The tree stump Jacob’s fifty feet away from meeting bursts as if it had been projected onto a giant soap-bubble. With it goes the impression of falling, the departure so sudden that Jacob staggers forward a couple of steps. This brings him to where Andrea and Angelo are wrestling in the red dirt, carried off their feet by the force of Andrea’s charge. Angelo is on his back, Andrea half on top of him. Andrea’s left forearm presses across Angelo’s throat, his right arm raises his axe. Angelo’s right hand is under Andrea’s chin, forcing his head back, his left hand grips Andrea’s elbow, holding his axe at bay. Andrea’s eyes dart in Jacob’s direction. Through teeth clenched shut, he hisses, “Come on!”