At last, though, Chaney picked up the dropped stitch himself: ‘The chieftain’s huri terrifies his people. It recalls for them their cannibalism. Stirs memories of a nobler but more troubled past. The huri brings the Asadi. At unpredictable intervals. To look at the standing remains of that past.’ Chaney’s tongue probed the membrane rimming his upper lip. ‘Which is finally. Inescapable.’
I touched the man’s shoulder. ‘Are you saying the Asadi’s case is hopeless so long as there are huri alive on BoskVeld?’
‘The Ur’sadi devolved. At least in part. To survive as an independent species. The threat of future enslavement hangs over them. Like a sword. And partially enslaves them. Now.’
‘And they did this to you,’ Elegy asked, ‘in hopes of enslaving you as they had once enslaved the ancient Ur’sadi?’
Chaney ignored his daughter’s question. ‘Ben,’ he said. ‘I want you. To uncover my eyes.’
I hesitated, and Chaney, encysted and bound as he was, registered my hesitation. His breathing altered subtly.
‘I’ll do it,’ Elegy said. She ducked beneath the several silken lines between her and Chaney and popped up beside his head. She had no knife now, only her hands and fingernails, but she grasped the shelf of caul above her father’s upper lip and began peeling it carefully backward. This time, contrary to her experience with the film over Chaney’s hand, her effort proved startlingly successful.
The skin beneath the caul was as smooth as volcanic glass, blue-grey in the shifting light. Chaney’s moustache and beard, as if they had been sprayed with an ultramarine dye and lacquered, revealed the same blue-grey glassiness.
‘Does this hurt?’ Elegy whispered.
‘I. Don’t. Feel. Anything.’
As deliberately as the defusing of a bomb, the unveiling continued, and when Elegy at last eased the caul backward over Chaney’s forehead, twisting it once and letting it dangle down behind his bandaged skull, we saw a pair of opalescent and nearly opaque lenses sunken into his face where his eyes should have been. Insofar as they were visible, the human eyes beneath these carapaces resembled tiny mouths whose lips have been sewn together. Chaney was right: His transformation had not taken. The vivid botching of his eyes synopsized and condemned the folly of the entire procedure. I blinked and looked away.
‘Father—’
‘You can see,’ he managed, ‘how it didn’t take.’
Elegy was as distraught as I had ever seen her. Her cheeks were wet. Her body trembled. She seemed to be discovering unrecognized villainies in herself as well as fresh horrors in the manipulative genius of the huri.
‘Father,’ she said, weeping.
And Chaney heartlessly inquired, ‘Who.’
‘Your daughter,’ I told him angrily. ‘A woman who has striven for eleven years to accomplish what we’ve accomplished today.’
And with a clipped and brutal clarity Chaney said, ‘I. Have. No. Daughter.’
Elegy didn’t recoil from this emphatic disavowal. She kissed her father on his altered lips. ‘I love you,’ she murmured defiantly. ‘I’ve loved you for as long as it’s been possible for me to love you. Since the beginning. I never stopped, not even when you didn’t deserve it and apparently no longer wanted it. That’s why I’ve put such implicit faith in you, even going so far as to manipulate others – like Ben here – to find you again. All this, Father, I’ve done out of love and a desire to redeem myself in your eyes.’
‘In my eyes,’ Chaney echoed her.
‘You know exactly what I mean, even in this pitiable and distant state! Don’t you! Don’t you, Father?’ Elegy pushed herself away from Chaney and grabbed a handful of the lines fanning out past us toward the limestone wall at our backs. These she bunched in her fists and yanked as she spoke: ‘You loved me once. You loved my mother once. You loved the Ituri pygmies whom none of us had any power to save. So you know. What I’m saying. Don’t you. Don’t you?’
‘Elegy!’ I grabbed her hands. ‘Stop it! You sound like you’re mocking him!’
‘He knows I’m here,’ Elegy declared, releasing the runners of bunched silk and wiping her face with the back of her hand.
‘I. Know. You’re. Here.’ The vibration of the chrysalis imparted a weird tremelo to Chaney’s words.
Elegy knelt again beside the pit.
‘I have no daughter,’ Chaney said. ‘Unless.’ The qualifier hung in the air like a scimitar, poised.
‘Unless what?’ she asked him.
‘Unless she redeems herself.’ The pottery glaze over Chaney’s features appeared to crack, the oddly human expression beneath it warping to betray a sense of unspeakable loss. ‘My eyes – blind or sighted – are of no consequence anymore.’ His tone was now almost conversational. ‘The Japurá business broke me. And the Asadi. The Asadi put me under.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘I want you to kill me, Elegy.’ A breath so deep it was almost a moan. ‘That’s why they led you down here.’
‘To have us kill you?’ Elegy exclaimed incredulously.
‘The huri superorganism doesn’t want. My death. On its conscience. Or on the debit side of its ledger. Of interspecies relationships.’ Chaney’s face was beginning to look human, despite the eyes. ‘Maybe it’s a karmic reluctance on their part. But I’m dying. And they don’t want to hasten my death. For fear of having to shoulder.’ Deep breath. ‘The blame.’
‘We’ll get you out of here,’ Elegy said.
‘No use. You can see I’m unredeemable. Unless.’
‘Unless I redeem you?’
‘By redeeming yourself.’ Deep breath. ‘With your love.’
Elegy twisted toward me in the cables and put her hands on my chest. ‘I want you to get out of here.’ She was pallid. In the same way your knuckles whiten when you clench something firmly, her pallor arose from resolution.
‘He’s trying to blackmail you,’ I told her. ‘You can’t let yourself be swayed by anything he tells you know. Look at him.’
‘He’s forgiving me. And himself, too. For the way he screwed up our lives after the Japurá Episode.’
‘By letting you kill him?’
Elegy put her cold hands on my face and thrust my head back so that her eyes could laser
