Irregularity Read online

  The bearers were easy company. The boy, in particular, was useful; he brought back small animals and interesting pebbles, bird’s-nests, snakeskins. As we travelled, he was constantly darting into gullies or turning over stones to gather up a feather, a piece of wool, a beetle carapace. Nothing extraordinary, but I saw that he understood my purpose. When we board-mounted a little bat, he very neatly fanned the wing for me to tap the brass tacks in, without needing instruction. It was hard to tell his age, seventeen or twelve, he was so thin. I think he ate better with me than he ever had in the town. Where he came from, I was not sure. He was not one I hired myself, but seemed to have come along with the older men. Jakkals, they called him. Though that was not his true name, I think. I started to call him Jacques, privately, when we worked on the specimens together. A sentimental impulse: it was the name of my own little boy, lost now these twenty years. With the men I called him Boy.

  Some days into our journey, we were passed by a group of riders, also heading north. The commando, as such posses are called, were after a baster gang: thieves and runaways, they said, causing havoc on the farms. A rough bunch themselves, these vigilantes, guns slung across their backs. They peered at our party with suspicion. It was not usual to a see a solitary white gentleman in those parts, certainly not a Frenchman. I mustered my best kitchen Dutch to persuade them on their way.

  The commando disturbed my men. After the riders left, kicking up dust to the horizon, they murmured uneasily to each other.

  Later, I asked the men about Venter’s beast, and handed the hat around the fire. They went silent. Between puffs on their long clay pipes, they said the name of the animal. Gumma, gauma, gomerah. Rasped in the back of the throat, in a way I am incapable of reproducing.

  “So it is real?”

  Hums of assent.

  “What does it look like?”

  “It has wings, very long.” One man held out his arms. “Black feathers.”

  “And a head like a lizard, with lion’s teeth.”

  “Very dangerous.”

  “It can eat forty, fifty sheep.”

  The oldest of the men, a dignified greybeard to whom the others deferred, pushed tobacco into the bowl of his pipe and said in his cracked voice: “It will look at you. It has the eyes of a man.”

  I smiled, to show I did not mind, that they made fun of me in this manner.

  The hat was passed to the boy. He did not usually speak in front of the older men, but now he touched the hatband with the tips of his fingers. “Ghimmra.” He said the name differently, with an altered emphasis, and when they heard him the others grunted and nodded approvingly.

  “I know this,” said the boy. “It is from my place. I am from that place.”

  Yes, I thought, that may well be. He has the look of a Bushman child. I wondered how he had come to be in the town.

  The quiet authority in his voice, and the gravity of all the men, made me think that perhaps there was truth in Venter’s story. This was, after all, a new world. Things were different here. Animals may yet exist of which Linnaeus had no knowledge, I mused. Look at the wonders they have found in New Holland: beasts with both fur and eggs.

  The commando was already encamped when we got to Venter’s homestead. Not much of a farm at all, just a poor dry tract of stones and sand and a mud cottage. No wife, no children. Some way behind the hovel was a domed skin hut where Venter, it seemed, kept a native woman. The riders were gathered at a fire on the packed earth before the house, drinking brandy; the woman brought them a new cask when the old ran dry. My men made camp some distance away, but I accepted a dram of the harsh white liquor and talked for a while with Venter and his companions.

  “So, Mijnheer,” I said to Venter, “where do you keep this animal you speak of? This — is it right? Geema, geemera.”

  He looked at me a little oddly then. “Where did you learn this name?”

  I smiled. “I am a naturalist, my friend. My task is to learn these things.”

  “Come,” he said, quite drunk already and putting an arm around my neck. “I will show you the proof of it.”

  Venter drew me warmly into his tiny house. There was almost no furniture in the single room, just a chair and a bed covered in skins. On top of a wooden trunk sat a weighty old Bible. He set this aside and opened the lid of the chest, then proceeded to bring his precious items out into the lamplight, one by one.

  I very nearly laughed out loud. Nothing but ratty pelts and dried-out bones, drawn from a dozen different carcasses. He held up the butchered wing of vulture, then what seemed to be the skull of a large bovid. Of some interest, but nothing extraordinary. At least he had not gone to the trouble of stitching it all together into a single beast, as I have seen done in fairground wonder-shows. I would not have been surprised if the man drew out a fish-skin or a bolt of flowered cotton and tried to tell me it was the hide of some fearsome predator.

  “Sjeemera,” he said. His way of saying the word was different, more sibilant.

  I smiled and thanked him and said that this was all most interesting, and that I would be glad to inspect his collection more carefully in the daylight. So as not to offend him, I picked out one or two small items — a few dark quills, a shed snake-skin. If I wanted the bones, he intimated, I would have to pay. I quickly made my goodnights.

  I left the fire and the drinking, choosing rather to lie in my own tent, close to the soft snorting and warmth of the oxen. Still, I could hear the men of the commando talking and laughing late into the night.

  Jacques, who slept at my feet inside the tent, spoke into the dark: “The animal, Mijnheer.”

  “Yes?”

  “I can take you to its place. I know where is its cave.”

  I was silent for moment. “Is it near? Can we walk?”

  “No. It is still a day from here. We must take the wagons. We should go tomorrow, early.”

  “How do you know?”

  “This is my place. My people are here.”

  That night there was a great storm, wind lashing the tent, the oxen bellowing. Something shrieked like a child in the trees down near the river. Later, we heard the calls of some large animal — but with a yelping, yawning quality, quite unlike a lion’s.

  I covered my head with an oily sheepskin kaross and thought of France, the motionless winter trees, the pale light touching the branches as delicately as gilt on the curlicues of the Countess’s cabinet of marvels.

  In her reception room, I had balanced on the spindliest of chairs as she showed me her celebrated collection: birds’ nests, curious stones and the skeletons of small animals, arranged in the specially built case of glass and wood all lacquered white. Light spattered off the touches of gold leaf, off the sunburst wings of the suspended hummingbirds. A thoroughly unsystematic approach, I noted, Mammalia mixed in with Aves mixed in with Fossilia.

  “Is it not pretty?” she asked.

  “Indeed, very pretty,” I agreed. High in her powdered hair, among the silken bows, another iridescent hummingbird was pinned. The blue flattered her eyes.

  She noticed my gaze and touched the stiff little bird. “From India,” she said. “Do they have such things in Afrique?”

  “If so, I shall endeavour to discover them, Madame.”

  “Hm. I think not,” she said. “From Afrique I want something… magnificent. A new kind of elephant?”

  “Perhaps something not quite so large...”

  “A tiger!”

  “I believe they lack the striped kind there. I will try for spots.”

  “Oh but I like the stripes. In the Jardin du Roi they have a leaping tiger, suspended in the air. It is quite wonderful. See what you can do.”

  “Madame.”

  That had been months before, but it felt like a hundred years. My mission now seemed laughable. How could the Countess have thought that a spun-sugar cabinet might contain any part of this elemental land? In my half-asleep state, it came to me that I had done things altogether back to front. All her pr
etty shells and pebbles… I should have put them in my pockets, brought them with me on the ship and set them free, here in this world of ancient stones and long horizons.

  In the blue dawn, the oxen stood shifting and blowing steam. The men packed the wagons quickly and quietly. It seemed important to leave before the commando stirred from their drunken sleep, although no doubt that would break all this country’s laws of hospitality. The armed company had made us nervous, and even the oxen seemed to tread softly for fear of breaking the chill and fragile silence. I was pleased when the little grey house dipped out of sight as the ground rose, as earlier I had been pleased to leave the town behind. As I had been glad to leave France, too, if I were honest, the dark wave sinking the shore in our wake. Always onwards, to new things. Away from old sadness. New wonders, I told myself.

  We found ourselves creaking up the start of a long mountain pass marked by stones. As the wagons ascended and the broad, brightening plain fell away below us, so too my spirits lifted. The track was edged with tiny white and yellow flowers. I thought about collecting them to press, but I did not want to halt our progress. And Regnum Vegetabile had never delighted me quite like Regnum Animale.

  At length we came out onto the neck of the pass, where Jacques indicated we should outspan. Above us was a rough tower of boulders.

  “Here,” said Jacques, and started up the scree. He went lightly, leaping barefoot from rock to rock. I struggled behind, sweat soaking my linen shirt. My face was flaming, even shaded by Venter’s odorous hat.

  In the shade beneath the rocks, the sand was cool. I took a moment to catch my breath. Jacques was crouched close to the base of a boulder, peering at something. At first I could not make it out, but then I saw: an image painted on the stone, about two hands tall. An upright red body with a long pale face like a deer’s or a hare’s, but the finely muscled legs of a running man. Tiny white dots on the torso.

  Despite my flush, I felt myself grow cold. “Is this what you have brought me to see, this… hocus pocus?”

  He patted the floor of the cave. Was he smiling? The white sand was scuffed with a multitude of indistinct tracks, including our own. “Here,” he said. “Here is where it puts its eggs.”

  “But this is no real beast,” I said, angry. I felt more deceived by this primitive display than by Venter’s skulduggery. “This is nonsense, Jacques! Why do you wish to trick me too?”

  He did not answer. Instead he squatted and pushed his fingers into the sand, digging away several inches. Under the top layer the soil became damper, darker. A smooth white curve emerged. For a moment I thought it was a human skull rising from the ground. But he shovelled his hands down around it and, after some heaving, forced a gigantic egg to rise from the ground. It was bigger than his head, much bigger than an ostrich egg. When I bent to help him raise it, I felt its weight. It was smooth and cool to the touch, and very heavy, as if full of molten metal. I took my water-skin and poured a little out; washed free of sand, the egg glowed like a great pearl, with a bluish cast.

  “What is it, Jacques? What kind of bird?”

  He spoke quickly, tongue clicking.

  “What? I cannot understand.”

  He sighed and closed his eyes and his arms floated upwards. Then his head jerked back as if in a fit, ribs jutting tautly. I stopped forward in alarm, then realised: it was a pantomime. This was for me, so I could see the nature of the animal. His hands flapped and slapped his sides. Feet scuffed the sand, tracing a circle. He bowed his neck and kicked at the ground, arms out like wings, then opened his mouth very wide and groaned. Teeth like the white quartz in the rocks, not porcelain at all. Teeth bared as if in pain.

  “That’s enough.”

  At once he stood quite still, as if I had slapped him.

  I ran my hands over the slick surface of the egg. “Tell me truthfully, now. Is this creature real?”

  The boy nodded, although his eyes were cool.

  “Then find me one. Find me one to shoot for my Countess. I have not time for make-believe.”

  I wrapped the egg in a piece of oilcloth and put it into my leather bag. Its weight hung awkwardly off my shoulder. As we walked back down the scree slope, I saw below me the two small wagons, the men lounging in the shade. It occurred to me for the first time that they might easily drive off without me, as I had heard happen to other adventurers. Once this thought had struck, it became harder to look away. I felt I needed to pin the men in place with my eyes. I thought of their uneasiness these last days, their murmurings to each other. The boy, I thought; they would not leave the boy behind. But perhaps the boy plans to flee, too. This is where he comes from, these hills.

  The men greeted me civilly, but distrust had entered my heart. I sensed their alertness when they saw I carried a prize. The old man came up to me quite boldly, reaching out a hand as if to touch my bag, but I turned away from him, holding it closed.

  I laid it next to my camp bed, where I curled up almost immediately, exhausted from the climb. Falling into slumber beneath the odorous kaross, I felt, for the first time on this journey, a longing for home, for walls around me, for the close skies and low ceilings and mossy damp enclosures of the old country. Rather than this bleak kingdom of stones, this Regnum Lapideum, roamed by unnameable animals.

  The bright sky woke me like a slap. Blue, so blue, it filled my eyes to the edges and beyond. I lay staring up at it for some minutes before I realised what it meant. The tent was gone.

  They had taken the horse, the oxen, the wagons, the muskets and ammunition. And Jacques, Jakkals, the boy: gone too.

  Leaving me what? The donkey, presumably out of some chivalrous impulse: I could ride it in shame back to Venter’s. The egg: it perched on the sand, balanced on one end. They had not wished to take it with them. And my collecting trunk. It stood askew on the ground, spilling its drawers into the sand, preserving fluid leaking from a corner. Its tiny compartments lay open to the sky, its intricate systems mocked by the boundless land. Carefully, I slid the drawers home, checking for broken jars and vials. Of course I could not move it on my own.

  At my feet, the dry mud was cracked into hexagons, marked only by the points where the tent-pegs had been sunk, the impress of the cooking pots, the cold firepit and the long churned wake of the oxen. I put on Venter’s hat with its fancy band and stood in the small puddle of my own shade.

  I would have stayed there perhaps indefinitely, staring at the donkey staring at me, if there had not come some time later — I cannot say how long — the reports of many hooves on the dry earth. It was Venter and the riders. They slowed as they came alongside, and the man nodded a greeting. He seemed amused, hair glinting in the sun as he doffed his new hat. The others barely looked at me; they preferred to read the story directly from the earth. It was not a difficult tale.

  The men wheeled their horses around me and took off to the north, faster now, chased by their shadows. That was what the commando was there to do, after all: pursue miscreants, thieves, absconders.

  I followed on foot to the top of the pass, where the land fell away. I saw where the wagon wheels had gouged a track, a steep descent back and forth to the plain far below. It was even vaster than the one we had crossed the day before, pale yellow like a scarred old lion-skin, sparsely veined where darker bush marked the watercourses. Far off were flecks of white and gold: a herd of springboks. Their heads were raised at identical angles to watch the slowly fleeing wagons, which churned in their wake a creamy plume of dust that hung in the air like blood in water. They were heading for a line of bluish hills. They did not seem to have gone very far, although the distances were so great it was hard to judge.

  Directly below me, more dust rose, marking the far faster progress of the commando. The riders had reached the bottom of the pass and were striking out across the plain. As the two trails converged, I realised that, despite my losses, it was the wagons I was urging on. But the riders were remorseless. A few minutes later, I heard the dull concussion of the fir
st shots. In the long-echoing stillness of the desert air, the buck leaped into the air and away, hanging for a moment on each bound like low-flying birds.

  I turned away and walked back to the immobile donkey. I stared up at the blue sky, letting Venter’s hat fall from my head. Very high up, a great bird was wheeling, but I could not make out its markings. I could not identify it at all.

  In the evening, they found me waiting back at the house. Venter let the boy’s body tumble from the back of the horse onto the ground. So light it barely stirred the dust. So bloodied that at first I thought an animal had slain him. But then I saw his head. Musket-ball, I thought. I’d seen that kind of wound many years ago, a boy myself, in the Spanish wars.

  “We lost the others in the hills,” Venter said, shouldering past me into the house. The stench of powder and sweat and blood. “God damn it. Brandy.”

  Outside in the raw sun, I saw the kitchen woman come, not with brandy but with an old kaross in her hands, dark and creased as a tobacco leaf. She knelt to fold it around the boy’s body, tucking it close with tense thrusts that made the muscles stand on her lean arms. At the last, he looked like a seed in a pod, a bat wrapped in its wings for the night.

  South Atlantic Ocean

  Already on the ship I could tell the specimens were rotting, that my techniques for preservation had failed in some or all of them. Perhaps the dank air in the hold had affected the formula, or seawater breached the wax seals. Not trusting the seamen with the delicate objects, I had chosen to keep them in the cabin with me, and lay on my trunks like a dragon on its hoard. I found it kept the seasickness at bay, despite the smells of meat and arsenic, to press my cheek to the cool wood. I dreamed the sea-chest beneath me was a coffin lid, with beneath it Jacques’ face, lips drawn back from broken teeth. But Jacques was buried under stones, hands clutched around his ankles. Far from the sea.