And it went unspoken around the room - and hence around the entire town -that visitors were approaching, straight-backed men with wide hats against the sun, for that was all they could be. Strait-laced women dropped giggles into their prayer books, forming a sort of welcoming party in their dreams, waiting for their stubbled magi.
And as they approached, those inside could visualise the dust spreading ahead of the visitors, a carpet of impurities, sustaining life, presaging arrival. Small creatures, flying and scurrying, were for certain being swept before the men, escaping the advance only by staying trapped in front of it. And still the spinsters muttered and still the men of solidity stared around, their glances fused to each other, man-to-man, out of their eye corners, their fingers trembling and their toes stretching the boot leather to rat-a-tat on the cold early evening floor.
The sand trickled through the lever clock that covered almost all of the end wall and the shafts of wood rose to confirm the position of the time. The inscription said, as it had said seemingly for ever "Time is merely the province of the ways of the god."
Now they could be heard by those within the room, the rumbling of too many feet on the bare earth floor of the outlying countryside. The prayer books were clapped shut. The feet started to tap brittle and heavy on the floor. Two of the designated eldest moved to the window and gazed out. But no one left.
The sand dripped down a spoonful further and the lever croaked.
An arrival had taken place. The bow wave of small-rats and giant dirt-moths and flap-sparrows fled through the wide main street, riding the surf of dust, but when the grubby wave had subsided, there was no one else there. The window bordered the slow emergence of the sun through the diffusing grime, illuminating nothing, nothing but absence in the silence excreted by the birds and the insects and the mammals as they continued to run and fly away, from apparently invisible and inaudible pursuers.
The spinsters and the worthy men emerged from the prayer house to the sun-shielded side-paths along both sides of the main street. And stared to left and right, but now no longer together, ragged, uncoordinated, sweeping their gazes across like a series of colliding and tangling creek-nets in the lakes of the top land when the waters were there and the fish were biting.
Nobody spoke. Time trickled away, particle by particle, until the air was clear and the dust was back on the ground. Shoulders were shrugged, and the strait-laced women and the worthy men moved away back to the indoors, ready to go back to their homes, for their community allowed of nowhere communal save the prayer room to go to.
But a mewling sound slashed the air like an invasion. An unknown but still-recognised sound. Imagine. A new-born infant in a celibate community. What a collision, what a grating, hitherto not experienced juxtaposition of tensions.
They moved as many to the source of the sound, self-corralled into a river reneging on itself and spurting away from its mouth back from where it had come. Custom held sway. The crush-together of strait-laced women led the melee of big-hatted men but within the sexes each individual was equal so elbows and shoulders and hips were utilised to gain position as they jostled in the direction of the lost, floated, released, unconstrained sound.
And they paused in front of a peeling green, clapwood door, no different from countless others, slashed into a cream-washed front wall. They milled outside, steam escaping through the tall hats like smoke through locomotive chimneys. The infant's cries were unabated, but now it had to compete with the clashes and slices of their own relinquished voices.
- Who has this thing brought here, this sound?
- They were here and now are gone and it is left.
- But no one saw; they had no visibility.
- Maybe the dust it was too thickened to notice.
- No, there was no soul there, and no body neither.
- But why this sound? Why this noise?
- It is a memory noise. Sister noise. Brother noise. Birth noise. Noise of the past. Young noise.
- Who is in there?
- Who else could be in there? There is no one who could be. There is no one that we do not know. There is no one there anymore.
- But this is no one’s house now or yet. Why are they here? Why do they do not open?
- They do not open because they are not there.
- They can not be gone. No sign of them was there.
- They are not gone. They never were here. Only was their apparition here.
The woman closest to the door rapped on it with the back of her hand, a ratatatat when the fingers unclenched and scraped the remnants of the paintwork but there was no reply, no reply but the scratched echo of her knocking and the underpinning pedal note of the baby crying.
She rapped again, and the child silenced itself but still no one came to the door.
After a third banging on the door, the man at the head of the throng of men pushed through, removed his hat from his scratched balding head, kissed the wood of the door, closed his eyes and mouthed but did not utter a prayer, his lips moving like a nibbling fish. He then nodded, economically but perceptibly, and stepped back. "It is forgiven," he said, "and hence permitted." The women barged against the door, two then four then six, and six was enough for it to give way. They stumbled through, the six of them, but remained on their feet and the bald man followed them through, the prayer still on his lips as saliva, so that now there were eight humans in the room but no more, because there was nobody there to greet them but the infant itself, crying, but not unhappily, alone in the cot. There was also a note, stabbed to the cradle's headboard with a snake-knife with a dried string of gut dangling from the handle, dyed in hoops of red…
for them people what finds this infant this infant is meant to be found and looked after by them that finds it this infant is important to us and should be important to you look after it if you do not look after it we will know and you will suffer we will be back but you will not see us then neither and this infant we will take away but this infant might not be no infant no longer but full grown up because many years might have withered away by then but not just that it might be the day after this day so you should be ready you should always be ready for when we come…
There was a smell of excrement, both sweeter and more acrid than that to which they have become accustomed.
Women pushed forwards. Three of them. They examined the child. It was a boy.
There was a silence, like an anticipation before the predator strikes.
One of them tore sheet-cloth from the abandoned bed, wrapped it around the pummel of her fist and held the infant up, supporting his fouled arse.
And further voices clashed through the silence, like the slick rip of a wolf-hawk's sneer.
- But how shall we bring him to the ways, if he has no freedom to join?
- We shall find us the means. And it shall be recognised. And jobs shall be created for him. Relevant to his need and his desire. And truth shall be bestowed upon him. And he shall be brought to the ways.
- And if he does not recognise the ways? How can he stay? He can not be jettisoned, for he has to stay here. To meet the necessity of the message.
- But how shall we provide him with food he can swallow?
- The ways shall provide.
- How?
- We shall invent the ways to our necessity if that is needed.
Outside, the dust was settled. Outside, there was now a sterile silence, with the wind tamped down and nothing moving.
And now then is now.
Sand and wood and time have swept across the prayer wall in the prayer room in the prayer-lashed town.
The boy has had five unacknowledged anniversaries of his birth. He plays on the floor, in the sand sprinkled by ageless ceremonies. He has grown strong and alone. He eats as well as he is allowed. The wet slave has been despatched back to her community.
They look at each other. They are all older.
A spoonful of sand that it now his responsibility to replenish every day drops onto the wooden mechanism. Time shuffles forward.
They look at each other again. They are all older still: just a second, but palpably older nevertheless. Then some distant movement starts and the floor jolts like a weak road. The hand of the prayer-clock trembles in the ever-encroaching vibration.
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