Norman Rush - Mortals

“Okay I give you credit. Are you happy?”

“You’ve got to tell me how you did it, man, everything. But how is everybody up here?”

“I think mostly okay. What is dilau, by the way? You’re the linguist.”

“I don’t have a clue.”

“Because they’re saying I’m dilau, I think.” “Rra, I can tell you,” Kevin said. “What does it mean?”

“Rra, it is saying you have the lerete of the lion.”

“What is that?”

“It is the genitals, rra. Dilau. The genitals of the lion.”

“Thank you,” Ray said to Kevin.

“Quite a compliment, man. But you need to sit down and we need to get out of here.”

“Stop telling me to sit down. Everyone’s doing it. I’m okay.”

Ray could see, as the smoke shifted, the fire like a vast bright claw gripping the roof. They did have to go.

They had to go especially because the faintness was coming back. He didn’t know if he would be able to quell it this time. He might lose consciousness, and it was impossible to tell how long a spell of unconsciousness might last, not excluding forever. There was something on his mind. At some point Iris would be notified about the outcome of all this, by someone, notified about who had survived. That moment would come. She would be waiting for it. Probably she would rather hear that Morel was alive. Or at best she might want to know equally. But in fact he knew her heart and if she had a button to press that controlled the news of their respective fates with one button telling his fate and the other button telling Morel’s fate she would punch the Morel button first. It would be a reflex. She wouldn’t be able to help it. He could see her doing it. She wouldn’t want him to see. But that was what he would see.

He was on the stairs. He was descending carefully. He was holding his bundle against his chest. Kevin was descending backwards, holding lightly on to him, which he didn’t approve of. Going backwards down the stairs was dangerous for his friend Kevin.

“Wemberg, the old man, is dead, Ray,” Morel said. Morel was just behind him on the stairs.

So that was another entry on the list of things he could do nothing about. The world was turning white.

“Catch him,” was the last thing he heard as he sank into vibrating whiteness, all the way into it.

He came awake looking at something like the sun and realizing he was being conveyed roughly away from the brilliant thing he was interested in. He was in a blanket turned into a hammock or sling in which he was being dragged somewhere else. His behind was suffering, which was only fair since unlike other main parts of his body nothing had been done to it to make it hurt. Two people were moving him along.

His mind was on the thing it had been on just before this, it was on Dwight Wemberg. It was important. He wanted to get up and get out and do something. The man had a history that had to be honored and it was unthinkable that his body might be left in the terrible desert. It couldn’t be allowed to happen, because it had been the agony over his wife’s body, being unable to reclaim it, that had led him out into extremis and his own death. There was some kind of parity that had to be honored. Wemberg’s body had to go back to Gaborone, his body at least had to go where Wemberg would have wanted it to go, undoubtedly to where Alice was buried, to Gaborone.

Two men were hauling him along. One of them was Kevin. He could communicate with Kevin. The other man was a stranger. He was wild-looking, a rustic, very thin, wearing seedpod armlets. He was straight out of the bush.

Kevin would understand about Wemberg. And if he didn’t, there were others he could inform about the problem. Except that he was being dragged away from the center of things, because of the fire.

He didn’t like to look at the fire, but he was facing it so he had to. He would never be able to come here with Iris, assuming that the world could have evolved in some inconceivable way, their world, and that Ngami Bird Lodge existed in that world … It was burning to the ground before his eyes, they could never come here. This would have been if she was through with Morel or he was through with her, if by some unimaginable turn of events either one of those things had happened and he had somehow heard about it.

The entire roof was in flames, it was a platform for spikes and leaping snakes of fire. It was crownlike. And smoke was beginning to leak and pour from the windows of the second floor, and that would be because burning stuff from the roof would be dropping down and setting the wainscoting, the carved wainscoting he had liked so much, and the other carved appurtenances, on fire. It would all burn. The furniture would burn, the beds, the bolsters, the rugs.

“Stop,” he said to Kevin.

“We must go as far as that,” Kevin answered, pointing. Ray couldn’t see where that was.

“This is far enough, isn’t it?”

“No, rra.”

Explosions, five or six of them, very loud, caused Kevin and the other man to speed up. The explosions had come from the east end of the burning building.

“It is ammunition, now,” Kevin said.

So it was prudent to get well away. Obviously there hadn’t been time to extract all the munitions or other gear the witdoeke might have wanted.

“I can walk, Kevin, rra. I can.”

At least he thought he could. He looked down at himself. He had been tended to, somewhat. There was oil on his skin. Someone had put a longsleeved shirt on him, not a clean shirt, a filthy one, but that was all right. It wasn’t oil on his skin, it was Vaseline. He had his boots, still. His bad knee was crimson, but it was nothing but Mercurochrome, the redness, on Quartus’s bite mark there. He felt his bad knee. He had to suppress a groan. Still, he knew he could get around. He had a knobkerrie. It was somewhere. Probably it was in the building and on fire itself. So he didn’t have a knobkerrie to prop himself up with.

“Stop here,” Ray said, jerking on the blanket.

They obeyed. Ray wanted to jump up. He couldn’t, quite. He rolled out of the sling he was in and got on all fours and laboriously got erect.

“You see,” he said, and immediately fell down.

They put him back in his hammock and dragged him along to the sound of even greater explosions. The entire building was going. He could see people running around like ants. Sobeit, he thought. And he went into darkness again.

…

He was awake. He was on a slight incline, he was beyond all the outbuildings. It was getting late.

He was by himself. He had been left there like a turd on a doily.

He stood up. He had the bundle under one arm and he was clutching the waist of his shorts tight. He thought he could manage his right leg.

And the conflagration was absolute, nothing would be saved. It was peach and black. He needed Kevin.

Things were going on near the conflagration he needed to be part of. He had to hobble toward the event.

It was hard, going there.

And his comrades the witdoeke were doing something that had to be stopped. They were throwing bodies into the flames and one of those might be Wemberg’s. He didn’t know. He needed to discuss Wemberg with them.

He needed to find Kevin, Morel too.

“Hey,” he shouted, entering the heat from the conflagration.

He saw people he knew.

“Here I am,” he said to Morel and Kevin and, there he was, Kerekang.

It was Kerekang, sitting on an overturned washtub, exhausted-looking, gray in the face, his hair grown long. He was wearing a witdoek, appropriately enough. He was wearing a fur vest and he had bandoliers crossed over his chest. He looked Mexican somehow. His arms were sinewy but too thin. He was wearing cargo pants whose pockets were loaded with things. He was wearing sandals. He was looking at the ground.