The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [18]
Filthy, on skinny haunches he listened to the fading moan of the padre’s horn. The instrument had sounded for the third consecutive night. Pan Renik decided right then and there that he would descend (albeit very cautiously, of course) to investigate.
The night was clear, with steady wind. Moon illuminated the cloudscape. Dreamlike. A triad of notes played over three nights indicated to Pan Renik—if memory served correctly—that an errant soul, teetering on the edge for some time, had now fled its corporeal home; the emptied husk could be sent on its way, to fall beneath the clouds, where only the dead could go.
Pan Renik, bug-eyed apparition, who once tore out his own matted hair, in dreads, to expose his white skull to the sky and unsuccessfully release unwelcome visitors from his beleaguered brain (and then lay bleeding and feverish in his nest, without help, for weeks), climbed quietly, hand over hand, lower and lower, nearer to the settlement.
Perched on a bough, body hidden by clusters of big leaves, he paused. A large crowd had gathered on the main branch. He hoped for an easy opportunity to rob an attendee or two—dash in, maybe get a few nuts or other treasures, then scurry off and up—but there were far too many padres and citizens on the branch for that: almost everybody in the settlement had gathered. Rows of people lined the bough, mostly on this side of dead man’s run, extending out to the end of the huts, their hollowed faces illuminated by well-guarded candles, and by the moonlight as it filtered through the rarified mists blowing overhead. Surveying this, Pan Renik grunted. Decrees must have been passed. Padres had wanted, for arcane reasons, full congregation.
Pan Renik wondered, for the first time since hearing the horn, who might have died.
Glimpsed between the forms of the citizens, he saw the corpse, tethered to a raft. No details. Pan Renik waited. He was good at waiting. That was another of his gifts. His life, it seemed, had been nothing but waiting.
Finally, caught in the orange glow of the guttering candles as they flared in the wind, he discerned the profile of the dead man’s face and he understood the turnout, the decrees.
The oldest man in the world had finally died.
While winds picked up, Pan Renik hunkered against the bark, clinging tight, not sure what he felt. Remote memories churned, memories of when he had still been a citizen, when he had known this dead man and had lived in the settlement, among his people. (But already an exile, he reminded himself: already stared at, talked about behind his back, mocked and derided.)
Back then, Pan Renik had slept in a forked branch, not too far from the dead man’s hut. Images rose and burst in procession. Once, he recalled, as punishment for a forgotten transgression—for breaking some ridiculous rule—he had been forced by padres to clean out the dwelling of the oldest man. Pan Renik remembered the stench of dried garbage, caked to the woven floor, and chunks of yellow phlegm, hardened at the side of the man’s cot. Even in these memories the old shitheap had been ancient. Yet padres, of course, loved the man, then as now, in death, because the dead man had been a toady, devout and unquestioning, a symbol of the padres’ success.
Pan Renik spat between the gaps in his rotten teeth.
As a young boy, he had heard that the oldest man in the world was born before the great branches of the world first kissed the sky—
Thwack!
The swing of the settlement’s sole metal knife caught Pan Renik by surprise; one of the attending padres—ironuser, it looked like—had cut the raft free.
Pan Renik craned to get a better look.
The old man’s lemurs, clearly terrified—not yet ready to leave this elevated plane of existence—huddled low against the corpse, growling and staring about wide-eyed as the raft began to roll down dead man’s run.
From the crowd—most holding candles aloft—came muted sounds of encouragement.
Beyond the limit