Journey to the Core of Creation, page 15
“They might not have any reason to do that, if they know of points of entry that the Bishop doesn’t,” Guérande said, hopefully. “Although he’ll find it easy enough to find the ones I know about, as Monsieur Dupin has pointed out, it’s possible that I can find others, with or without the Thierachians’ help. It’s possible, too, that the Bishop can be persuaded to hesitate—or, at least, that the Comte can be persuaded to withdraw his backing from the action. Lebrun thinks, perhaps rightly, that it would be difficult to persuade a tribunal of the reliability of the Thierachians’ records—but if Lebrun can teach Monsieur Dupin enough of their script to allow him to act as a translator and a potential witness, the threat of such an action might be enough to persuade the Comte to retreat—and without the permission of the notional landowner, the Bishop’s license to act becomes dubious.”
“Is he correct, Auguste?” asked Madame Guérande, drawing a rapid scowl from her husband.
“Quite possibly,” said Dupin. “Did you talk to your daughter before you sent her to bed?”
“I asked her what tales she had heard about the mountain, and assured her yet again that there is no dragon sleeping beneath it.”
“What did you tell her about the flameflowers?”
“The flameflowers? It’s the dragon that she’s afraid of, not the flameflowers. I did tell her that there was no such thing, of course.”
“Perhaps I asked the wrong question. What did she tell you about the flameflowers?”
“Vague nonsense. They’re said to be exceedingly precious, and magical. They’re said to be products of the dragon’s fiery breath, capable of movement when newborn, although they settle into immobility when they become flowers. They sing, too, in some of the tales, although not everyone can hear their song—like the chirping of bats.”
“The details are all commonplace folkloristic motifs,” I pointed out.
“Indeed,” said Dupin. “Stubborn beliefs, in which storytellers still delight, in spite of the advent of the Age of Reason.”
“That doesn’t mean that there’s any truth in them,” Guérande said—but Dupin looked at him skeptically, as if to suggest that Guérande was the last person who ought to deny the suspicion of some truth behind the rumor.
“No, it doesn’t,” Dupin finally admitted, “but it does suggest something about the nature of belief, and it serves to remind us of one interesting fact that we learned from Monsieur Lebrun that passed without comment at the time.”
“That the Tibère heir did go into the caves, presumably of his own accord,” I put in, eager to claim the credit for the insight. “Do you think he was looking for flameflowers?”
“We must presume that he was looking for something,” Dupin said, “and that the lure was strong enough to counter his fear of waking the dragon. The Bishop might have had a hidden agenda when he set out to compile his statistics, but they do speak for themselves, as he contended. It is possible that more children have gone into the caves, over the years, in search of flameflowers...just as it is more than probable that Monsieur Guérande is not the first adult to have done so.”
“Is that true, Claude?” Julie Guérande demanded. It had suddenly occurred to her, I think, that there might be more than one reason for her husband’s secrecy with regard to the object of his assiduous research in the caves—that he might simply have been embarrassed to confess that he was chasing the substance of local superstition and children’s nursery tales.
“Yes and no,” Guérande replied, defiantly as well as reluctantly. “No, I’m not searching for frozen dragon’s breath—but yes, I am searching for something depicted in the cave-paintings. Perhaps it doesn’t exist—perhaps I’m misinterpreting what I see, and perhaps what the ancient artist was depicting was merely a product of his imagination, a whom of his own superstition—but the animals are real, and while there’s a possibility....”
“A possibility of what?” his wife asked, sharply, when he failed to finish his sentence.
“A possibility of confirming his theories,” said Dupin, softly. “First and foremost, of course, Claude is searching for more artifacts, and more bones. Like Boucher de Perthes, he’s exceedingly eager to find more human remains in company with ancient chipped flints and charred animal bones—stronger evidence for the existence of humans far more ancient than Bishop Ussher’s Adam. But he also thinks that there’s a glimmer of hope—a literal glimmer—of finding evidence of another creation, another evolutionary sequence, never wiped out by the kind of life to which we belong because it’s protected within the bowels of the earth: the creation based on heat rather than light; the creation that makes light out of heat rather than heat out of light.”
Guérande shrugged his shoulders, resignedly. “I gave you all the pieces of the puzzle, Auguste,” he said. “I knew you’d put them together—but don’t judge me until you’ve seen the paintings. Time hasn’t done them any favors, but they’re still visible...and legible. When you’ve seen them, you’ll understand. God, I haven’t quite lost hope yet that even the Bishop of Viviers might understand, once he sees them—if he can squeeze his paunch through the narrower passages.”
Dupin patted his own paunch, although he had several inches of girth to spare over the Bishop. “Children have an advantage in that regard,” he murmured. “Smaller frames...as well as keener ears.”
“Do you think that flameflowers sing songs like the sirens of antiquity then?” said, Guérande, with a slight sneer to which he did not seem to me to be entitled.
“Unfortunately,” said Dupin, with a sigh, “I already know that the sirens of antiquity were real, and I cannot discount the possibility that the rumors of singing are as firmly based as the tales of precious flameflowers...if there is, in fact, any truth in the latter.”
“I will have a close watch kept on Sophie,” Madame Guérande said, cutting short any debate.
“That might be a wise precaution,” Dupin said. “The possibility is remote...but sometimes, remote possibilities should not be ignored. When we go to bed tonight, let us try to listen with an open mind, not merely for the dragon’s breath, but for the strains of temptation.”
He was being whimsical, I knew, but I also knew that he was being serious. Who could blame him? Claude Guérande had been going into the caves every spring and summer for twenty years and more, to study images that he had first discovered as a boy. The Thierachians came here every year, in their hundreds, and had apparently been doing so for centuries, perhaps thousands of years. And all of them were secretive about it, as if compulsively. I did not doubt that they all had conscious reasons for behaving as they did, which seemed perfectly reasonable to them...but as Dupin had said, sometimes, remote possibilities should not be ignored.
I was still looking forward to going into the caves, however, to see Guérande’s artifacts. If I too were to be enthralled as a result...well, I had experience with sirens, and things far worse. Eventually, even the hardest skeptic learns to trust in luck—or destiny.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE THIERACHIAN HERITAGE
Logically, my third night in the bosom of the dragon should have been easier than the second. I should, by then, have grown quite accustomed to the noises from underground. Dupin’s whimsical suggestion that we should all try to listen to them more closely was not advice that I intended to follow. I wanted to sleep, in preparation for the next day, when we would certainly be confronting the Thierachians, and perhaps, if the way had cleared, making our first foray into the caves in Guérande’s company.
For that good and sensible reason, I made every effort to screen out the distant hissing and the groaning, and to ignore the occasional ghostly tremor that brushed the house as lightly as the flicker of a butterfly’s wing.
One of Dupin’s favorite sayings was that consciousness is a refuge. What he meant by that—assuming that he knew what he meant, and was not merely hazarding a hypothesis for subsequent investigation—is that consciousness operates as a filter, protecting our self-awareness from things that a raw, untutored mind might find difficult to bear. If that is true—and I believe it with all the conviction of which my heart is capable—then consciousness is a good and frequently-effective guardian; indeed, were it not such a good guardian, I would never have got into the habit of making the notes on which this and other narrations are based, for if I had not written some of these incidents down while they were fresh in my memory, thus secreting and securing them, I believe that that they would have been gradually erased from conscious memory, or at least reduced to the status of distant dreams, capable of stirring a slight frisson of anxiety but not of troubling faith in the normality of the lived-in world.
Perhaps, I sometimes think, it would have been better not to have made those notes—and better, too, not to have gone back to them at an interval of several years in order to reconstitute the experiences as they were lived and felt. That is probably what a sensible man would do, seeking to take advantage of the guardianship of consciousness and the refuge it provides—but I, like Auguste Dupin, am one of those individuals severely infected with contradiction by the imp of the perverse. That was not a contagion I picked up from Poe, who shared a similar affliction; it was what drew me to Poe in the first place, and him to me. Perhaps, since I had begun my association with Dupin, it had become something of a folie à deux, but neither he nor I was able to regard it as folly, and I remain convinced to this day that Madame Guérande was right in her estimation that we were good for one another, and needed one another’s society.
Had we be born Thierachian, or stolen by them while out minds were still raw and untutored, we might have had an entire society...but I should not get ahead of my narrative.
Consciousness did indeed contrive to keep the dragon at bay while I went to sleep on that third night—but when consciousness has contrived to nullify itself in order to rest from its efforts, even an adult mind becomes exposed to strange influences. Most dreams come from within us, but not all. Some are visited upon us by whispers and tremors from without, and the mere fact that those whispers and tremors are simple natural phenomena, including those generated by complex interactions of water and fire, does not mean that they cannot take on meaning.
What I dreamed that night was not a nightmare, nor was it a prophecy, although it seemed like both. The unconscious mind cannot predict the future any more than the conscious mind, for the future is yet to be made by our actions, rational and otherwise, but it can imagine it—and in imagining the future the slumberous mind cannot help but reflect our deepest fears.
What I dreamed was that one of Georges Cuvier’s Epochs of Nature was about to end, and that the surface of the Earth was about to undergo one of its periodic upheavals: an apocalypse in which strange beasts would emerge from the earth and the sea, and the sky would change its face, and angels of death would run riot in the world, brining in a harvest of souls with their fiery blades—and there would be a Judgment.
Yes, there would be a Judgment, before the throne of Creation, which would determine those species that would survive, and flourish in the world to come, and those that would be condemned to the oblivion of rock, as petrified phantoms, faint, incomplete and broken.
It was not a personal Judgment; I was not involved as any individual self of any sort, but merely as a tiny atom in the flotsam of humankind—a species condemned and doomed, unable to survive the ordeal, in spite of all its science, art and music. Our failure was nothing of which we had need to be ashamed, however, for it was far more basic than any matter of mere intellect, rooted in the most elementary processes of nourishment. It was the sun that had judged our entire tree of life to be defective, and had transferred the loyalty of its light to another, better adapted to the spectrum of its emissions, with a kind of vital spark that was gifted with a greater zest and sense of purpose.
I could not see that new tree grow, or even display a tiny shoot, but I participated in the withering and decay of our own, the humiliation of its demise, and the bleak awareness of its loneliness. There was a bitterness in the knowledge that it might have done better, not only in terms of the failure of its own internal harmony, but in terms of its failure to reach out, to communicate in some fashion with the other trees of life making up the universal forest.
That, I felt, had been in some strange way my purpose, and my failure, for which the censoriousness of my cowardly consciousness had been responsible.
It was only a dream—and that vague description of its content and emotion was all that I was able to write down before active consciousness, guided by the morning sunlight, brought a conclusive end to its ephemeral empire. I knew, though, even as I began the dutiful work of forgetting it, that it was significant. Significant of what, I did not know, but I knew that it reflected or portended something. Not the end of the world, of course, or even the Epoch, and perhaps not the end of anything at all—but something....
“Did you have bad dreams last night, Monsieur Reynolds?” Madame Guérande asked me, when we all sat down to breakfast.
“I did,” I confirmed. “I fear that I have not yet accustomed myself to the agitations of the neighborhood, although they are certainly no noisier than the night traffic in Paris.”
“You are not at fault,” the lady assured me. “I have never known the stirrings so urgent in the twenty years and more that I have lived here. I think I would have had nightmares myself, had I been able to sleep at all.”
“It must be the weather,” Guérande opined. “The southerly wind is uncommonly warm this year, and the thaw has been faster than usual.”
“Are you sure that it is not an increase in the heat diffusing from below?” Dupin asked him.
“Perhaps that is a factor too,” Guérande conceded.
“I slept quite well,” Sophie put in—and only brought the ghost of a frown to her mother’s face for having spoken without first being spoken to.
“That’s good,” her mother said.
“Did you dream at all?” Dupin asked her, curiously.
“I believe so,” the little girl said, scrupulously, “but as soon as I awoke I forgot what I had dreamed. It was a pleasant dream, I think. Strange, but pleasant.”
Dupin nodded, as if in approval—but I knew him well enough to know that he was ruminating some exotic possibility. Trust him, I thought, to find something ominous in the child’s forgotten but pleasant dream, and to pay no heed at all to my echoing nightmare, a window to which had been cemented in my consciousness by my note-taking habit. I said nothing about the content of my dream, however. How could I, in front of the child?
I said nothing about it, either, when Guérande, Dupin and I set off for the Thierachian encampment to keep our appointed tryst with Arnauld Lebrun. We walked in silence, all three of us somewhat weighed down by anticipation. None of us knew what we might be told by Lebrun, as a spokesman for the tribal elders, but all of us were eager for whatever enlightenment the man of law might care to provide about the secret beliefs and folkways of the nomads—and we were a little apprehensive too.
Guérande had been to the camp-site on numerous previous occasions, and had been received placidly, if not hospitably, but his questions had never been answered. Many, if not most, of the adult Thierachians spoke French as well as their own language, but that did not prevent them from refusing to understand what they did not want to understand, nor from lapsing into incomprehensibility when they did not want to be understood.
This time, however, the visitors did not wait for Guérande to come into their midst. Lebrun came to meet him, to intercept us a full hundred meters short of the nearest cart in the ragged ring that formed the rampart of the improvised village. He had four men with him; they were all older than him, but they let him take up a stance ahead of them.
I could tell, as soon as we were within twenty meters of Lebrun’s position, that something was wrong, but I had no idea what it might be. The four elders did not seem angry or aggressive, nor did they seem frightened—but something was on their minds. Lebrun did not seem angry or aggressive either, but he did seem anxious and apprehensive.
For a moment, I thought that they intended to hold conference there, in the open, forbidding us entry to their camp, but they were only observing some kind of etiquette. There were no introductions by name, and no handshakes or accolades, but we and the elders exchanged formal bows, and then the five Thierachians led the three of us, with all due dignity, to the center of their encampment, where there was a damped-down cooking fire, and a circle of chairs established nearby, around a wooden table. There was a large metal kettle on the table, still producing vapor at the spout, and eight cups.
We were shown which seats to take, positioned so that there was an alternation of elders and strangers—with Lebrun, for this purpose, seemingly classed as a stranger. The lawyer was stationed between two elders, as Dupin, Guérande and I were. Guérande was seated opposite Lebrun, while I was to his left and Dupin to his right.
There were men and women busy with various tasks around us, but the only child I saw was a girl of approximately the same age as Sophie, who poured the liquid from the kettle into the cups, and then distributed the cups, with considerable care, serving the strangers before the elders.
It was a infusion of some sort, but not tea. It was slightly bitter, but not altogether unpleasant. I sipped it cautiously, as did Dupin and Guérande, and then looked at Dupin in search of an opinion. He made no signal, even with his eyes, but I thought I detected a certain suspicion in the way he held the cup, and I resolved to drink as slowly as I could without seeming impolite.
The elders did not seem impressed by our wary eagerness to make ourselves agreeable. The girl brought bread, then, on a wooden tray. The bread was already broken into morsels, which she distributed. The elder sitting to my right nudged my elbow to attract my attention, and then made a show of dipping the bread into the infusion before taking a bite. I thought that he might have made less of a pantomime of it, but followed his example half-heartedly and rather gingerly. He laughed—whether at the mere fact of my compliance, or some awkwardness in my performance, I could not tell. His teeth were yellowed, but not by nicotine. The Thierachians did not smoke or chew tobacco.
