The Godling: A Novel of Masalay Read online

  The Godling:

  A Novel of Masalay

  CK Collins

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements & Dedication

  Part One: The Thicket

  Part Two: Down the Nights

  Part Three: The Snare of the Fowler

  Part Four: A Lower Deep

  Pronunciation Guide

  Map of Masalay

  Copyright

  The Godling: A Novel of Masalay. Copyright © 2011 by CK Collins. All rights reserved. Published by Folded Story.

  The Godling is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons (living or dead), is entirely coincidental.

  www.thegodling.com

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to The Jewish Publication Society for permission to reprint an excerpt from Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures: The New JPS Translation to the Traditional Hebrew Text, © 1985 by the Jewish Publication Society.

  Edited and produced by Christina Elmore.

  Cover image copyright © 2011 by Folded Story.

  Kindle Edition published November 30, 2011 by Folded Story.

  ISBN: 978-0-9848496-0-4

  Acknowledgements

  Novels are written in solitude but never in isolation. I created this book with and through the vital support of Allison, the daily inspiration of Molly and Tess, the skill and vision of Christina, and the enduring affection of my mother and sister.

  Dedication

  For James Kelleher, who showed me where and how and let me discover what.

  You lay your hand upon me.

  It is beyond my knowledge;

  it is a mystery; I cannot fathom it.

  Psalm 139:6

  It is not down in any map; true places never are.

  Herman Melville

  Part One

  The Thicket

  4 October

  * * *

  Patchil-Kinaat, Masalay

  I quiver.

  I’m lifted and rubbed. Cleaned and turned and talked to. I seize. I’m seized.

  They get liquid down my throat. Whisper about me.

  The words are foreign, they’re distant, but I know what it’s about. They don’t get me — how I came here — who I am — what’s been keeping me alive.

  If I spoke the same language as them, if I wasn’t sunk so deep, I’d tell them it’s okay — I’ve tried for 27 years, and I still don’t get me either.

  * * *

  It happens gradual — they quit talking about me and start talking to me. One of them, when she’s washing me, she sings soft. They want to give me something to grab onto. They want me to know I’m not alone.

  Which is nice, it’s very sweet. But this black deep, I’m not ready to come out.

  And anyway, I’m not alone.

  * * *

  I heave and there’s light. I’m over the side and the bed is below and the floor is belower. I hit heavy.

  Stench wet. I push and the puddle pulls away.

  I’m okay. Nope — I drop, I retch.

  This burning bile. Another retch. I lift till I’m standing. Grab the twisty bed sheet and dry my face. My jaw hurts from the floor hitting it. I’m spinny.

  So many beds. All asleep.

  Far-up windows keeping the heat in. My tongue in paste. A light bulb battered by bugs. There’s a jar of maybe water. I get there slow, leaning on beds but nobody wakes up. I drain the jar and when the water’s gone I wet my lips with the dribbles that went down my chin.

  I hear a moan. From the far end of the room, raspy and sticking. It comes back, and I know that sound, that rattle, it’s the noise that life makes when it’s leaving.

  Somebody has to come — a nurse, orderly, somebody — you can’t ignore that sound.

  I wait.

  Again, louder.

  It’s just us.

  I make it there without falling over.

  A man. Masalayan. I shoo away the flies. I whisper — I tell him I’m there. Him knowing English is not too likely, but what else can I do, I talk to him in the only language I’ve got.

  “It’ll be okay,” I tell him. It’s weak light from the ceiling bulb. But enough so he sees me.

  I give him my hand and he grips me frantic.

  Dizzy, I lean against the bedpost. “It’s okay,” I keep telling him, and we’re that way till the end.

  I close his eyes, fold his hands on his chest, and hate that I don’t know the words that Masalayans say when someone dies.

  I fall onto my mattress, I sink into my mattress, under the deep deep again. But not for long. I’m back in the world. I’m alive. And there’s something alive in me.

  11 October

  * * *

  Patchil-Kinaat, Masalay

  Noisy, too bright. People moving in and out of sunlight. They can’t believe I’m awake. That I’m alive.

  A doctor talking fast at me. It could be English. I try a smile, but my face aches. Thirsty. I tilt my hand toward my mouth and a nurse catches on. She gives me a cup but I’ve got too many fingers and I have to hold it with my palms. I gulp. More doctor types crowd in, talking about me — disagreeing about me, seems like. Fine but I really need to pee. The gesture for that is less obvious than the one for drinking. A nurse, the one who likes to sing, she finally helps me up, takes me to a toilet. Right in the same room, behind a half-curtain, but I’m too desperate to feel shy.

  We get back and there’s porridge. A weird sour taste but I nod yes for another bowl. But what I get instead is more commotion and people — a man and woman dressed real nice. They get intercepted by the doctors. People point and wave fingers not polite — a you’re-not-the-boss-of-me kind of argument. The new ones win. The woman takes a seat next to me and smiles.

  She talks. It’s English for sure. But I can’t find my listen button and I don’t care about food anymore, I just want sleep. I hear a word I know. It comes again, and the word is me. She waits. I swallow a couple times to coax my voice. “I’m Callie, yeah.”

  She shoots a told you so look at the guy and presses her hand against her breast. “Callie, my name is Pashi. And my husband Essio.”

  “Hi.”

  “Callie — Essio is Rika’s brother.”

  She waits a second to let it sink in.

  “Where is Rika, do you know?”

  I don’t want to look at her. There’s a million-legged bug wriggling up the wall, leaving a shiny trail. I want to trade places.

  She asks again where’s Rika and I make my voice behave. “I don’t know.”

  She looks crushed and her husband starts pacing, arms folded tight. I know what they’re thinking — they’re thinking Rika messed up his life for no reason. For some American girl he barely knows. Who he can’t possibly care about.

  Whatever, you can know another person deep without knowing them long, that’s just the truth.

  I manage a smile. I’m dizzy and I could really do with more water. They try smiles too, her more successful than him. Waiting for me to say something. Expecting me to explain everything so that it makes sense. But it’s not going to make sense. Not to me — and not ever to them.

  “It was kind of crazy,” is what I finally tell them. “I mean, we were at that place, that lake, what’s it called?”

  “Lake Ghaatasira.”

  “Right, right.”

  God I want to get back to that place.

  Not the lake — that was scary — I want to get back to that place of being with Rika. In him, all the way in him, and him all the way in me. I’d stay there forever if I could.

>   “We were there and hiding out,” I mumble. “There was this little place he knew about, where nobody could find us and———”

  “Why didn’t you leave?”

  The why is because the danger weighed less than the desire, but I can’t say that. “Sorry . . . I don’t know. I just remember I got sick and . . .”

  “Right, right.” She finds a way to sound patient. “Maybe it will come back to you.”

  “Can you tell me, I mean I don’t even know, where am I?”

  “You’re in hospital. In Patchil-Kinaat.” I must have a dumb look on my face because she adds after a sec, “On the island of Masalay, yeah.”

  “Right, no, I remember the Masalay part. But how did I get here exactly? To the hospital, I mean?”

  She breathes deep, disappointed that it’s her telling me things and not the other way around. “You were in a place you shouldn’t have been. Terrorists all about — even if we’re all meant to pretend otherwise. And then you both got sick, punned-in with Riybe. First you then him.”

  She looks at the doctors like she wouldn’t trust them to bandage a Barbie. “If it even was Riybe. Be grand if someone here knew how to make diagnosis.”

  What I know about Masalay would maybe fill a napkin, but even I can tell that she’s a Runai, her and Essio, and that everyone else here is a Talid. A lot of them probably don’t understand English, but we’re in the north — I think we are — and Runais in the north are a minority. So she’s got to mind her manners a little. She smiles and brushes back her pretty hair and tries to put a softish tone on her put-downs. “Came Rika bribed some Talid to smuggle you out of there. Miracle of it all is that he didn’t pocket the cotton and drop you in a ditch. Did as he was paid — refreshing, slightly shocking. Left you here alive and posted a letter to Essio.”

  “What about Rika, though?”

  “We don’t know about Rika.” It’s Essio, the first words out of his mouth, and he’s pissed. “That’s the point, isn’t it?”

  Pashi gives him a back-off look. I apologize again for not understanding how things work here. She finds her patience again. “After 1 September the whole lakes region belongs to Hilm Hivaa. Their bargain with the prime minister: They stop blowing things up in the rest of Masalay, stop impaling teachers and postmasters, and in exchange she lets them own the northwest of our country. They get to order out the Runais, which is what they’ve done — and get to punish anyone who gives comfort to them. He found somebody who’d risk moving an American. But not him. So he stayed behind.”

  All hushed-voice, a nurse is translating to a group in the corner. Everybody glaring at Pashi. Whatever. “So the letter — Rika wrote it?”

  She nods.

  “Can I see it?”

  “It’s back in Jaya.”

  “And it’s in Masalayan,” Essio throws in, being a jerk. “Can you read Masalayan?”

  “No.”

  “It’s brief,” Pashi says, “and he was ill. But he was right specific. He said we were to find you and bring you back to Jaya.” Essio really wants her to stop there but she blows him off. “And we’re to set you up in his house — and see that you’re looked after. He’s right explicit about that in the letter. Is he not, Essio?”

  He doesn’t answer. And doesn’t have to. A doctor comes in with a couple guard-types. Seems like they’ve decided that this is their hospital dammit. One of them talks to Essio in Masalayan, reminding him where the exit is. As much as he doesn’t love being bossed by a Talid, it’s obvious he’s glad for an excuse to leave.

  “We’ll be back tomorrow,” Pashi promises. “Straight away.”

  “Thanks.” But then — I just do it — I grab her hand. “Wait. I have to tell you . . .”

  They all look at me, the whole crowd of them. “I should wait for a test, I know, but I don’t need a test. I’m pregnant — I can feel it — everywhere.”

  12 October

  * * *

  Far Karsk, Masalay

  Sinkweed and grass have swallowed the road. Tchori grips the steering wheel tighter, straining not to curse in front of Brother Carodai, who seems convinced that this is all great fun. The right-side tyre drops into a hole and pops out with a jolt. He grins, as if it’s a spectator sport. “A deep one, that.”

  “How this can be called ‘a road.’”

  “Is it called anything, child, I don’t recall?”

  Another hidden rock scrapes the axle. “We live in a third-world country, Brother, truly we do.”

  “Perhaps,” he says after a time. “But so lovely.”

  She glances at the fog-hung mountains, the tangled black trees, the green hills pocked with stone, and observes that it depends on your definition of “lovely.”

  He’s just finished the last of the deirin buns and his purple robe is dusted with crumbs. She’s never fancied deirin herself, but Brother doesn’t consider it a proper morning until he’s had one. Or three or four. So she made arrangement to buy a half-dozen before the bakery opened this morning. They were out the University gates at quarter-till-six, almost on-schedule, the car perfumed with yeasty sweetness.

  “Perhaps I’ll render the tea,” he says, noticing the canister at his feet. “Unless you’d care to.”

  “No thank you then.” It’s been sloshing with every bump, irking her. “And mind you don’t get it in your lap,” she cautions, feeling, as she often does, that their ages are reversed.

  “Oh, well, I do enjoy a challenge.”

  She watches him have a go at the lid. “It won’t do to have you arrive drenched.” She pulls as far over as seems prudent and lifts the handbrake, thinking that it ought to be a crime to drink tepid tea. “Is it looking familiar, then?”

  “What’s that, dove?”

  “Where we are. Tapping you familiar, the surroundings?”

  “It’s forty years, dear,” he reminds her after a desultory look about. “I’ve difficulty enough remembering the way to my office. You mustn’t worry, though. Harsh red hills in all this green — we won’t miss them.”

  The car is idling strangely. Probably something knocked loose. Tchori folds her arms. “Are they three separate hills? Or are they connected at the base?”

  His eyes go to the ceiling as he tries to recall. “I believe that they are connected.”

  “So a ridge, then? Not red hills — a red ridge?”

  An indulgent smile as he sips his cold tea. “If you prefer, yes, a red ridge.” Dipping his head to look west: “Looks like rain.”

  “What the road needs, more mud.”

  “Might fill in the holes.”

  “Fabulous.”

  He laughs. Fondly — but she wishes he didn’t so often seem entertained by her. Returning her hands to the wheel, which seems to be vibrating more than it should: “We should be on then.”

  “You wouldn’t fancy stretching your legs, dove?”

  She’d love to. But one look at the dense woods dissuades her. The British dispatched doomed expeditions into the Far Karsk for the pith part of a century before deciding, like so many Anarthan emperors before them, that the damned place wasn’t worth the effort. A land without resources, on the way to nowhere important, and filled with people who seem descended from the hills they inhabit. A Karskan face, it’s said, is a tool for breaking the knuckles of heedless punchers.

  “I’m fine, Brother, thank you. Do you want to stretch yours?”

  “No, no. My legs no longer stretch, they only creak.”

  Tchori lowers her chin and rolls her neck, kneading with thumbs in unsuccessful effort to get the kinks out. She wants to ask what this is all about, this ridiculous trip. The letter is right there on the rear seat — she could drop it on his lap and press for explanation.

  Mind, he doesn’t owe her answers, she would never claim that — a novice has no right to know her dean’s thoughts. If he wants to be driven to the ends of the earth for no stated reason, so be it. But is it irrelevant that he’d not have received the letter without her hel
p?

  * * *

  The post is meant to be brought by the afternoon runner. But never has a title been less apt — come volcanic eruption, their runner would not break his customary shuffle except to shout across the magma for cricket scores — and Brother Carodai was expecting galleys from the States. So, rather than wait idly, Tchori ventured to the postal centre in the bowels of Baakdirin Hall.