Chapter 20 That night Jacobs gazed long into the portents of the fire. If his history should shape nations, or if it should cease, it made no difference to him. He would live to look upon the western sea, and he’d long ago abandoned the weighing of any consequence. His fate be written in the earth itself, and in it he claimed corporation, and said so, and he would drive the remorseless sun on until the day of his death, so that the last of its setting and final darkness would be as if he had ordered it all ages since. Before there was a sun, before he swore to strike it down if it insulted him. *** They rode toward a small village where a crippled man sat on the ground, repository of ten thousand indignities, his hands outstretched as though to be cleansed or to cup water, but really to receive whatever alm might befall him to ease his burden. “Por favor,” he said. “Puedo comer?” Jacobs trotted his horse before him and drew his gun. “Coma esto,” he said. He aimed the gun and pulled the trigger, the barrel rolled, the hammer arched back and banged into the shell, as if the very mechanism of fate itself, and the barrel flashed. The man’s head exploded in a spray of red. The man fell backwards to the dust, and the man’s eyes saw nothing at all of that terrain or the graying sky or the children who stood crossing themselves in that pale light. This man and his despair went away forever from that road, and the winds blew and the birds called, and all things kept on toward their chosen routes which some say are determined long ago, even to the beginning of time. *** The company galloped forth through the village. Phantom riders, ashen with dust, nameless in granulating temperature. They looked as if given up entirely to an undertaking, primitive, void of empathy. Like riders cajoled out of the very stone placed enraged and hopeless, to roam wrathful and as unknowable as primordial hunters navigating in an ancient time before names were. *** They rode on. The stones laid across the surface of the world, adhering to a darkness unascertained and unascertainable both in truth and in principle, where God and matter are locked in an alliance that is silent in the universe. Much of the world was unseen by them and it shimmered in mysteries, as it was boundless and could not be measured, and within it were animals more cruel than they, and humans of different colors, and things which none have beheld, and still not estranged, nothing there more than their own human hearts were estranged inside them, whatever wide open spaces included therein and whatever carnivores. *** They rode past two dead babies on the plain, millions of dreams in their decayed hearts. Dreams in the legions of nights such as a child would dream them, realms beautiful or painless, worlds which one may bequeath to oneself, but can never make be. *** And that night they made a fire which pulsed like the heart of a living creature. They gazed into the flames which had within them a part of man himself, such as they are depleted if it were not there. As one fire is every fire there was, the original fire and the final fire there ever shall be. *** The mountains were pale in the first dwindling dark of dawn, and birds flew and the sun made its right ascension over the apex of the world and lined up with the moon which shown in the west, so that sun and moon lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun burning and the moon a duplicate, as if they were the ends of a mutual terminal beyond whose boundaries were flaming worlds past all approximation. *** The gang rode across the desert with a drive which predated them, blood beneficiaries of an organization at once burning and crucial and distant. Each member was individual by himself, yet consolidated they were something that before had never been, and inside this conjoint soul were great desolations impossible to navigate, even more than those tattered remains of ancient and destroyed maps where demons dwell and there is nothing of the recognizable world save assumed currents and fires.
Posted on: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 03:08:10 +0000
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