HAYNTA-6
If my dance, if you will allow such a grandiose term, with Nolk that spring was an exciting interlude in the ongoing misery of my interment at Clark’s Hill, then the day the cage wraths came was an exciting interlude in my dance with Nolk.
That dance—yes, I’ll continue with grandiosity for consistency’s sake—was an interlude that needed an interlude, although I had no conscious awareness of that at the time, and even if I had I would not have chosen an encounter with cage wraths for it.
It was an interlude that needed an interlude because it (the primary interlude, the one with Nolk) was anguishing. Let’s face it, bewitchment, or maybe I should use the softer phrase “unacknowledged attraction,” is anguishing; and I was anguished.
I loved it, being bewitched, that is; and I truly liked Nolk, beyond the unreasoning and overpowering attraction I felt for him. At the time, I would have said that his presence filled me with light. I know now that this wasn’t the case, but I think I sensed in the flush of our interaction a flicker, or promise, of a light, or something that I longed for; and this was the source of my anguish. I was reaching for this flicker without knowing precisely what I was reaching for. I was desperate for it, unsure of what it was or even that it was real, and afraid that it would always elude me.
If Nolk had said anything to confirm that my attraction to him wasn’t reciprocated, I would have been crushed, but at least the spell would have been broken; if he had said anything to indicate that the attraction was reciprocated, it would have transformed the spell into something else, and there, too, it would have been broken; if he had flirted with me in any way, or said anything at all suggestive, my liking for him would have been diminished and the spell would have been broken. But he never did. He never acknowledged that I was attracted to him, or gave any indication that he could possibly be aware that I was. I knew at some level that he had to know—he would have to be dense beyond belief not to realize that a girl following him around like a puppy had to have a flame burning for him, and he wasn’t dense at all, he was quite sharp—and I raged inwardly at him for avoiding the obvious, for being, I thought, a coward; but raging doesn’t break a spell, it only intensifies it.
So, almost any diversion from this agonizing intoxication with Nolk would have been a welcome relief (even if I didn’t realize it as such); and perhaps even the cage wraths’ visit was a salve to my agitated psyche. No, I won’t go that far. In any case, the evening they came, early evening it was, I was on my way back to my room from the library, where, having not found Nolk in the Nonagon after my classes, I had been grinding through my studies. Having achieved a solid once-over of everything that I was supposed to learn, I had decided to reward myself with a leisurely walk home, and was now circumnavigating the nine buildings of the Institute.
It was a nice walk, I had to admit, especially on a day that heralded the summer with an early burst of warm air. The wall of pinkish-orange brick and stone that surrounded the Institute as if it was a fortress, and which was about the height of, oh, five people, maybe six, lent an air of peaceful isolation to the outer grounds, augmented by the many big calm old oaks, hickories, wambawams, and souses planted in strategic designs to appeal to the aesthetic sense of the average person. The outer grounds: as opposed to the inner grounds, which were so self-satisfactorily called the Nonagon by students, teachers, and administrators alike. There wasn’t any clever name for the grounds between the outer wall and the nine buildings that comprised the Institute. It was simply the outer grounds.
You could get to just about anywhere you wanted to go at the Institute by cutting across the Nonagon, but there wasn’t a rule that said you couldn’t use the outer grounds, and in fact the flower-lined cobblestone walk that circled the nine buildings in a wayward path from big tree to big tree, with cross walks that led to the doors of every building, seemed to invite you out there, for a meditative ambulation.
Students preferred the shorter routes from place to place that the Nonagon provided, however, so that other than the occasional intrepid wayfarer and of course the omnipresent janitors (who were, nevertheless, not so numerous on the outer grounds as they were in the Nonagon and inside the buildings), you weren’t likely to run into more than a person or two if you decided to take a stroll on that cobblestone walkway. Now that I consider it, this may have had more to do with the outer grounds’ air of peaceful isolation than the fortress wall and all the big trees did. Not having to deal with people goes a long way towards making something pleasant. There were nightly gatherings on the Offices/Library lawn, but if I chose to take a walk, I could usually get it in before the crowd started to gather.
Usually when I walked, I stayed on the cobblestone path, although if I were willing to risk a disapproving look from a janitor I might jaunt across the lush, feet-caressing lawn. Either way, it was a nice little trip during which I could enjoy some peace and quiet, think about things (most notably Nolk), and just be happy to be away from the sickening gabble of other people.
To be candid, while the idea of taking a walk was appealing, I didn’t actually take them very often. But when I did, I was always compelled to go all the way around the Institute, sort of saying hello to each of the nine segments that, as I perceived them, comprised the circumnavigation of the nine buildings. Nine buildings, nine segments, yes, you heard, or read, that right. Indeed, while all of the buildings were almost identical—three stories of the same vainglorious salmon-colored brick that the outer wall boasted, striped every twenty or thirty bricks with a layer of white block, and bedecked only with a set of big black doors and a row of small rectangular windows near a flat roof (with the three dormitory buildings offering a more generous proliferation of windows, along with a preponderance of little brown doors instead of the one big black set)—the area of lawn between each separate building and the outer wall had its own character, or at least its own set pieces, if you will.
The Offices building, of course, oversaw the grand entrance to Clarks Hill: the enormous black iron gate that opened upon an immaculate, treeless, lawn of green cut by a wide path of stone lined on both sides with pots of flowers—orange summertops in the spring, red and yellow marigolds in the autumn, and blue candles in the winter. The Library was the top floor of this building.
Going clockwise, upon the lawn in front of the Cafeteria building was a collection of huge metallic spheroids the purpose or use for which I could never discern, along with a couple of small groves of oak and hickory. Next, the area outside of the first of the Classrooms buildings, though dotted with a number of short thick brushy souse trees, was marked in character, I thought, by two poles of smooth gray rock, taller than the souse trees. One was a flagpole, or it was used so, anyway, one of the janitors raising the Clarks Hill pennant to the top of it every morning and lowering it every evening. At the top of the other was an always-burning oil lamp. Both of these poles seemed to me to be gesticulating aggressively at the sky with a self-aggrandizing bitterness.
A grove of oaks that announced the seasons with the fullness of their foliage and the color of their leaves dominated the grounds outside the second of the Classrooms buildings, while on the lush lawn of the third Classrooms building was spread an assortment of flower bushes planted in concentric circles around a waterless stone fountain. In front of The Gymnasium building statues of muscular people discouraging non-muscular people from entering were arranged in a phalanx that I imagined would have impressed the Shakis himself.
The few bare spots of earth upon the grounds—patches of dirt where it seemed nothing would grow no matter how often the janitors seeded them—dotted the lawn of the First Dormitory building in the shadow of a haphazard collection of oak and wambawam trees. The lawn of the second Dormitory building was home to a number of towering hickories as well as several large piles of brick and wood that seemed to suggest that some new construction was soon to take place, although in all the time I was at Clarks Hill, it never did.
The world outside of the third Dormitory building, which was the one I lived in, was comparatively nondescript, a few clusters of trees near the outer wall the only blemishes in the veil of green that the long splengrass of the lawn presented to any window spectator—except for one thing, which gave the area as much or more character than any other area on the entire grounds: A single tree, small with pinnate leaves, which bore bright orange berries, stood by itself in the grass about a quarter of the way to the wall. Though small, this tree had, to me, an air of ancientness. I fancied that it had always been there, watching the eons go by, enduring generations of human foolishness. The monks may have planted all of the other trees on the grounds, but this one, I imagined, had been there before the monastery was built, long long before. I had never seen another tree that looked like it, or that bore its unique orange fruit, nor had anyone else: the students, the teachers, the janitors, nobody could identify its species, not even Mrs. Camden.
The outer wall of the institute was high enough that when walking around on the grounds, one could see nothing but clouds and sky beyond our little insulated academic world, other than that on the back side of the school (relative to the front gate), where the wall was a bit closer to the buildings, you could see a few ragged leafless treetops peaking over from a scragglebom forest beyond—spying on us like dirty old men, I’d heard it said.
When I first heard the wraths, or maybe I should say when my ears were first accosted by their bitter howls, I was nearing the end of my stroll. I had started at the library, and had not planned well. Afternoon had been beginning to slide into evening at the time, and this transitional hour or so being, for me, the most pleasant time of the day to be out and about, with the wind having recently been at its afternoon apogee and now plunging towards its dusk nadir, this quick lessening of climatic energy creating the effect of a lazy stillness into which all the odors of tree and flower and all the sounds of bug and bird flowed, I found the atmosphere so welcoming when I reached my dormitory building, which was the next building down from the library, that I decided to add a full lap to my after-studies wind-down.
By the time I got back around to the Offices/Library building, where to my consternation the evening congregation was already beginning to form, this extra distance had begun to take its toll. My feet hurt, I felt groggy, and I was getting eager to lie down on my bed and fade into sleep imagining other lands and other people, who understood and loved one another.
I was trying to decide whether to turn around and walk all the way back around the school to my dormitory building, or to glue my eyes to the ground and try to sidle past the crowd unnoticed, when the most horrendous noise imaginable obliterated the calm reverie of the evening. Bloodcurdling is a much-overused term, but if anything I’ve ever heard has been bloodcurdling, this was it: the noise entered my ears with skin-peeling ferocity, and quickly spread through my body, solidifying (it felt like) the blood in my veins and rendering my heart useless.
I knew this horrendous noise was the cry of the Cage Wraths of Ek-Kur, partly because moments after it arose, the bells atop the Offices began ringing out in the pattern that the students had been instructed warned us danger was at hand and that we should go inside, and partly because while never having heard the cage wraths before, I, like most children in Lenima, had heard horror stories about cage wrath raids, the most memorable aspect of those stories being the unbelievable descriptions of the horror of the monsters’ screams, and partly because somebody who must have had much more presence of mind than I did cried out, “cage wraths!”
Screams, indeed: I guess a scream best describes the noise, although I wouldn’t necessarily have called it that, or a shriek, howl, or wail, either. There’s just no better word for it. Mix together the screeches of a catfight, the wail of a baby, the howl of a lonely yelg wolf, the laughter of a maniacal killer, and the death scream of a giant karakan lizard, and add an ethereal volition to enact evil to it, and that’s about as good a description as I can come up with. It seemed as if it came both from beyond the Institute’s fortress wall and from right behind me. That is, while not loud per se, there was a force about it, as if someone were screaming in rage right into my ear, which made all other sound difficult to discern.
Whether I was panicked, dumbfounded, or some strange sorcery was at work upon me, I couldn’t know. My heart fluttered like the wings of a wounded bird, desperate, non-rhythmical; my knees banged against each other; I wanted to run, most of all, I wanted to hide. Yet, I didn’t move; I was oddly lethargic, I was rooted to the spot. I couldn’t move, or so it seemed. I was only aware of my surroundings as from the fringes of a deep fog of time. Other students—those who had come out to join in the nightly festivities on the lawn—were just as overcome as I was. They stood, or wandered about, aimlessly, mouths agog, eyes staring furtively about them, whether more afraid or confused, it would be impossible to say.
How long everyone would have remained in this stupefied fog, and what would have happened to us, I don’t know. Cage wrath raids had been rare for many years, though there had been rumors that they were on the rise; so most of the stories about them were old and sketchy, many of them dating back a hundred, or, most often, two hundred years, to the troubled time before the Shark War. Some accounts claimed that households, villages, or even whole towns of people were slaughtered and eaten, which as horrible as it might be, I could imagine; others spoke of a “harvest,” or “metastasis,” which I couldn’t imagine. We were ripe for harvest, that’s for sure, just waiting there like baby birds, for whatever fate the wraths chose for us.
Then, Mrs. Camden stepped into the fray.
Where she’d come from I hadn’t seen—suddenly, she was in the crowd of students, directing them into the Offices building. Probably she’d come from one of the Classroom buildings, where she’d been going over student papers, or perhaps reading from one of the many books on the shelves in her classroom, which she often did.
“Come along,” she said, with undaunted cheer, “It’s time to go in.” She tapped a tall dark boy on the cheek. “Come on, Namad, back inside for awhile; yes, that’s it.” Namad obeyed, dumbly following her. Taking another, shorter and stockier, boy by the hand, she said, “Come along, Thromm,” and he, too, followed her with unhesitating obedience, his body and will seemingly activated by her commands. Student by student she went: “This way, Lubin; come along, Keeny, this way Tulla,” speaking with a firm calmness, loud enough to be heard over the shrieks of the cage wraths, but not so loud that she seemed anything but her usual low-key, calm self, until enough students were following her that the rest were drawn along by the crowd, towards the black double-doors of the Offices. She ushered them into the building, and then, after telling a wild-eyed administrator, who was waiting inside, to lock the door, she walked west, towards the Cafeteria building.
And the shrieks of the wraths continued to accost me, if anything with an increased intensity, and I was alone, in the shadow of some souse trees, I was alone, not far from the Cafeteria’s metal spheroids, I was alone, and the shrieks bored into me, filling my head with blood—curdled blood.
“Haynta! Haynta!” Mrs. Camden’s spectacle-magnified eyes were searching mine with some concern, and yet cheerfulness as well, and reassurance. Her hand was touching my cheek; her warm, calloused fingers offered a solidity to hold on to in the rushing darkness of the wrath screams.
She smiled, and that smile offered solidity as well, and reassurance, and encouragement. I felt unreasonably safe, like a small child, scared of the night, now snuggled in the arms of her mother, or father, as if they, mere humans, could truly defend him or her against creatures of the dark.
“Come on,” she said, taking me by the hand; and I found myself following her to the first of the Classroom buildings. Once inside, she locked the doors behind us, let go of my hand, and moved with what I will call an urgent amble along jagged corridors of mottled tile and old wood, the smell of cleanser heavy in the air, an indication that the janitors had been through recently. Nolk, perhaps? No, probably not. The feel of the hard skin of her hand against the soft skin of mine had kept the cries of the wraths at bay; now, to keep from becoming frozen again, I locked my eyes on the fabric of her long gray skirt and thick gray socks, and let the rhythm of her steps draw me forward.
Each of the three Classroom buildings at Clarks Hill had nine classrooms, but because each of the rooms was a nonagon, the corridors were slanted and jagged, which, as I had found out as a first-year student, could make it difficult to find the room you were looking for. I remember thinking that it was a good thing there were only nine rooms, or nobody would ever even get to class! Now, following Mrs. Camden, keeping my eyes fixed on her skirt and her socks, I thought, “Nine buildings, and nine rooms in some of the buildings: nine must have been an important number to the Monks of the Iron God.” And then I thought, “Why is this the first time I’ve thought of this!”
At length, we came to the back door of the building, a single black one that opened into the Nonagon; and going through it, we beheld what was to me a surprising scene. I suppose I thought that something similar to what had happened in front of the Offices building would be transpiring in the Nonagon as well, that is, that people would be standing around dumb and slackfaced waiting to be slaughtered, only in greater scope; but such was not the case.
Well, it was to some degree; but quite a number of students, along with a few janitors and one or two teachers were making their ways in slow, confused paths, to various buildings. In a second, I saw why: it was Nolk. He didn’t seem to have Mrs. Camden’s natural shepherding abilities, nor was he possessed of the air of brightness and confidence that she had displayed; but, by ones and twos, he was moving the crowd indoors, while, others, half snapped out of their fogs by his volition and that of the people he was leading, were heading in on their own.
Still, there remained quite a few frightened souls wandering about in a fearful daze, ripe for the taking, and these, after telling me to stay put, Mrs. Camden began shepherding, in the same manner she had rescued the students that had been caught in the stupefying brainhold of the wraths’ cries in front of the Offices. The process took a little more time than it had in front, there being quite a few more people here in the ever-popular Nonagon, despite the evening lawn gathering out front, but she herded them all in like an experienced sheepdog—with me still tagging along behind her, having disregarded her command to stay put. I was afraid that if I took my eyes off of her socks and skirt I would again be overwhelmed by the shrieks, which had become deafening, increasing numbers of wrath voices seemingly being added to the inhuman chorus.
When everyone appeared to have been herded inside, Mrs. Camden rendezvoused with Nolk. Nolk’s actions had been, to me, more amazing even than Mrs. Camden’s, because while she appeared to have some sort of immunity to the wraths’ voices, he didn’t. He was pale (for him), trembling, wild-eyed with fear, and sweating as if he’d been carrying sacks of rocks in the hot sun; and yet he’d managed to direct the retreat into the school with an efficiency that while perhaps not rivaling Mrs. Camden’s, was, to me, impressive.
His eyes met mine, and he nodded in acknowledgement of my presence, which thrilled me; then, his and Mrs. Camden’s eyes locked, and she asked, “Mrs. Catnip?”
He started to speak, choked on the words, and then shook his head.
Mrs. Camden said, “I’ll check on her; go make sure the boys are with Mr. Catnip.”
He nodded and then trotted away, in the direction of the Cafeteria. As I watched him go, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the other janitors, Brothers Hals or Geln, for example, would lambast him for helping the students to safety instead of cleaning the latrines, particularly since his hood had come down during the fuss.
Mrs. Catnip was the new history teacher at Clarks Hill, having replaced Mr. Chimneylark almost a month earlier. She was a small woman with fine features, a coal complexion, a mischievous smile, and cropped and spiky jet-black hair, who seemed even smaller than she was, but whose audacious, true, and jovial spirit filled the air with such lung-filling laughter and appreciation for the “mysterious grand,” which was a phrase she would use, for example, upon hearing thunder or music, seeing snow, or simply looking, with the darkest of blue, almost black, eyes, into the sky, that if you were in her presence for long you felt that she, and you, were giants traversing mountain ranges with mighty steps.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that this glowing portrait of her isn’t mine, it’s Little Bolo’s, a paraphrase of one she drew one evening the next year when she and I were talking about Mrs. Catnip. I was too wrapped up with myself and Nolk at the time to have gained much of an impression of her, other than a general sense that she was likable and a vague realization that history class was becoming more enjoyable.
She seemed so small because she seldom stood up. She taught her class and in fact went about just about everywhere, in a low-seated, wheeled, chair. She couldn’t stand up other than to wobble about with the aid of crutches. Her legs were damaged in some unknown way. This wheeled chair was an ingenious contraption that she said her husband had contrived to put together. “Oh, he can figure out just about anything,” she said, not in a bragging, or even a loving, way, but as if she were stating a fact.
He had, to summarize (I don’t remember all the details), taken an ordinary wooden chair, nailed strong squares of wood to the underside of the seat, cut small round holes into these squares of wood, lacquered the holes and stuck a rod through them, fastened small replicas of wagon wheels to these rods, and attached two smaller sets of wheels to diagonal support bases that he had added to the front and back legs. And, voila, she could move herself without undue difficulty simply by pushing on the wheels with her hands, or to turn, by simultaneously yanking on the wheels and throwing her weight around in just the right way. The seat was so low because her husband had had to shorten the legs considerably to keep them from scraping the ground and impeding her mobility.
She had two little sons who sometimes could be seen haunting the halls of Classroom building #2, or to the chagrin of the janitors, running around in the Nonagon, or after the day’s classes, mooning about in Mrs. Catnip’s classroom while she went over her students’ papers. I had never interacted with either of them, but they seemed wild and incorrigible, especially the older of the two, who was probably six or seven, so I had an immediate liking for them. They, I assumed, were the “boys” that Mrs. Camden had ordered Nolk to check on.
Utilizing the limited capacity for thought that I had reclaimed watching Mrs. Camden and Nolk work their magic, I ascertained that Mrs. Camden was concerned specifically about Mrs. Catnip because she didn’t get around very well. Many of the teachers, Mrs. Catnip included, lived in the residential area north of the institute, and walked home some time between when classes ended for the day, and dusk. Mrs. Catnip wheeled herself home, of course, and I thought that because Mrs. Camden had said she was going to check on her, she was meaning to head outward, towards that northern neighborhood, to make sure her colleague hadn’t been caught on the roads. But she didn’t do that. She went, instead, to Classroom building #2. On the way there, she noticed that I was still with her, or at least chose that time to address that circumstance.
Regarding me with her spectacles-magnified eyes that seemed more those of a Leopard warrior, now, than of my dowdy teacher, she said, “Haynta, well, now,” in a gently chiding way, then paused, considering something, and went on, “Well, come along, perhaps you can look after Mrs. Catnip.” She locked the door of the building behind us as we went in, moved, still with that urgent amble, along the slanted corridors again, and after opening the doors of a couple of rooms, at last found Mrs. Catnip, where in the dusty crisscrossing light of her classroom’s high windows she sat rather pensively at her large desk, several thick books spread out in front her. She looked up at us, in, it seemed to me, a blank fog.
Strolling towards her, Mrs. Camden said, “Mrs. Catnip, I’m glad you’re still here. You’ll have to stay a little longer, I’m afraid.”
“Mrs. Camden, what is going on?” Like Nolk, she was pale, trembly, and a little wild-eyed but did, actually, seem to have the greater parts of her wits about her. Inside the buildings, the effect of the wrath screams was dulled, although, and this was amazing to me, you could still hear them clearly, right down to the ugly, feces-smeared slime of their textures.
“A wraith sighting, it seems. Maybe quite a number of them. Haynta’s here to keep you company.”
Mrs. Catnip nodded, looking me over with her shrewd but genial black eyes. It was obvious to me by the flavor of her observation, as if looking not for the first time at something, but checking whether there is something about it that she hadn’t noticed before, that she recognized me from class, although she didn’t say so. Whether she considered me worthy company, I couldn’t tell, but she said, “Excellent. It’ll be gratifying to have some company with these nasties about.” She indicated the wraths with a raise of her eyes.
Mrs. Camden bowed with a half-smile, and left without any more ado than that. I saw her remove her spectacles as she departed the room.
So, I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening alone with Mrs. Catnip in a darkening classroom, sitting in a corner behind her desk. Safely indoors, the effect the wrath shrieks had on me was diminished, but I still felt like hiding, and without Mrs. Camden’s calming presence, I found that I was trembling again. I had a favorable impression of Mrs. Catnip, but the two of us were, in actuality, almost complete strangers, and with me being a person always uncomfortable, nervous, even scared, in the company of strangers, her presence did nothing to assuage my feelings of unease.
Mrs. Catnip seemed ill at ease at first, as well, but she was a garrulous, sociable, individual who the company even of a comparative stranger comforted; and it wasn’t long before she acclimated to the situation.
After we’d stared at each other for a few moments, she declared, “I feel like hiding, don’t you?”
I stared at her a moment longer, then swallowed and nodded.
“Hm,” she said, surveying the room; then, regarding her big desk, declared, “This looks like something to hide behind. Let’s scoot it over to the corner.”
There were of course quite a number of corners in a nonagonal room, and I, still dunderheaded, looked from one to the other in jaw-sagging perplexity.
“Over here,” she prompted, nodding towards the nearest of the corners that wasn’t blocked by a bookcase, of which there were several in the room though not so many as in Mrs. Camden’s.
Grabbing one edge of the desk, she began wrestling with it ineffectually, the wheels of her chair sliding back and forth on the wood floor as she pushed and pulled. She did, to my amazement, manage to budge the big buffalo of a thing a finger or two along, and her gallant efforts spurred me to action. I bent to the work, and after some grunting and pushing, pulling, wrenching, shouldering, and just plain cajoling (that is, saying such things as “Come on, you!” and “It can’t be that heavy!”) we managed to situate it crosswise at a front corner of the room.
“Excellent,” she exclaimed, “And impressive Haynta; that thing is solid oak! Now…” and, to my great surprise, she tottered out of her chair, pulled herself onto the desk, slid herself across it, and gingerly lowered herself into the triangular space between desk and wall, disappearing behind the desk as she sat down.
“Aren’t you coming?” her voice asked after a few moments.
I clambered across the desk, then, and sat down beside her in our makeshift cubby.
“There, that’s better! They won’t find us here,” she said. And somehow it did feel safer behind the desk, our backs against the solid old-smelling wood of the wall, even though I was sure that if any wraths found their way into the classroom they wouldn’t have any trouble finding us.
My fear of the wraths, or maybe my apprehension of a more primal fear which had been drawn to the surface by the shrieks of the wraths, had decreased from paralyzing to heart-palpitating by coming indoors, these ongoing palpitations nevertheless rendering my muscles shaky and inflexible, my mouth dry, my mind unable to lock onto thoughts and words, and my whole body saturated in tension. However, the ludicrousness not only of hiding behind a desk with my teacher, but hiding in a way that wouldn’t decrease our chances of being found actually tickled me enough that I snorted. Mrs. Catnip laughed gaily in response.
I wondered, randomly, how many other people at the Institute who didn’t know each other were huddled together hiding in unfamiliar rooms in absurd hiding places—on beds, for instance, or under beds, in closets, or behind other make-shift forts.
In an attempt to break the tension I’m sure she sensed in me, and which the ongoing aggress