Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [81]
I was on my way toward that area of the village in which the bar had been carved when I came upon a crowd of fifty or so of the Tekelians standing around in a circle, muttering their harsh consonants as they stared into their grouping’s epicenter. It is in man’s nature to be drawn by the crowd, if only to see what everybody else is up to. Even when that crowd was composed entirely of albino snow monkeys, I wasn’t any better (perhaps there was more krakt!). Weakly, I began to insert myself into the middle of the assembly, but thinking better of it, I decided to gain a more remote access point from which to watch the spectacle. Kicking a notch in the ice of a nearby building, I hoisted myself just high enough to see past all of those cloaked hoods that were getting in my way. What I saw at first I took to be an icon: appropriately, they were worshiping a block of ice.‡ It was about ten feet tall, roughly hewn, powdered white by snow on its sides, upright and phallic in presentation. This was not the only phallic presentation in this spectacle. In response to some fierce barking call, the assembled crowd returned a roar of its own and from within their cloaks removed long, pointed bones, what appeared to me at first to be the tusks of a mammoth but were more likely the ribs of a small whale. To my great and growing horror, I saw that the ends of these were sharpened to fierce points like calcium swords, with grooves cut into their bases for handles.
“KARARUM!” one of the beasts yelled from his perch by their frozen idol, and above the tall crowd the bone sabers rattled, banging horribly off each other in deliberate percussion.
“They’re going to war,” I muttered in disbelief.
“No shit. You really are a genius.” The sarcastic words came with a hand on my startled ankle, and when I looked down from my perch I saw that they belonged to Nathaniel. It was unnerving to see him in the state he was, in some ways more so than to see the monsters get more monstrous. The Morehouse Man was now unshaven, and a scraggly beard had gotten the best of him, clinging to the sides of his face like a mold. Strong cheekbones that had once protruded now seemed to just poke out, the cheeks below nothing more than sunken caverns. Stains of krakt were apparent on the front of his coat and gloves. The Morehouse Man is a well-groomed man. I didn’t know who this Nathaniel was. This is not to say that at the moment I cut a stunning figure myself, but even in the real world I was known to let myself go for the sake of a good book with more than three hundred pages.
“You okay?” I asked, climbing back down. It was a rhetorical question, but the man Nathaniel had become was in no mood for rhetoric.
“Am I okay? Nigger, do I look okay? I can barely walk. It’s going on three weeks and my ankle still looks like a cantaloupe. And once they saw I still couldn’t walk, my snowmen kicked me out. Carried me down here and left me. Can you believe that shit?” he asked. I could. Behind us the creatures yelled the mindless syllables of nationalism followed by more waving of swords in the wind.
“ ‘The Melt.’ That’s what they’re saying. That’s what they say they’re going to fight.”
“The Melt? How the hell do you know they’re saying ‘The Melt’?”
“The melt, or the heat, or something like that. It’s the word they use to describe when things start