Read Online Palace of the Peacock by Wilson Harris - Free Book Online Page A

fantasticwheel of dawn strengthened and sliced his mind. It was an ancient runaway home of his father’s he had reached. His father had settled here late in life – with a new mistress – and founded a separate family. Some said he guillotined his birth-right for a song, a flimsy strip of a thing, beautiful as a fairy. All was rumour and legend without foundation. Even as a boy Schomburgh had known the truth and dismissed the exaggerated fairy-tale. His father was dead. That was the living truth. And yet he could not stir one step beyond where he now stood. He stood there it seemed for the passage of months until he grew greyer than the ghost of the stars and the moon and the sun. She was waiting for him he told himself, like any young girl – frightened in a first indiscretion and affair – nevertheless waiting for love to enter and take her everlastingly. Her folk and parents would kill the fatted calf and welcome him like a son. He shuddered, and the vibration struck him inwardly, a lamentation in the wind, fingers on the strings of his spirit, the melancholy distant sound of a raining harp. His fear and horror lifted a little as he heard it – riveted to the ghostly threshold and ground of his life. It no longer mattered whether Carroll was his nephew or his son or both. He had heard clearer than ever before the distant music of the heart’s wish and desire. But even now he tried to resist and rebuke himself for being merely another nasty sentimental old man.
    *
    Vigilance bowed for Schomburgh, his paddle glancing and whirling along the gunwhale, equally alert and swift on both sides when the occasion demanded. His penetrating trained eye saw every rock, clothing it with a lifelikeness that mirrored all past danger and design. His vision of peril meant an instantaneous relationship to safety. He offered himself to the entire crew – as he bowed – a lookout to prove their constant reality – and he hid his tears from everyone. The truth was Carroll was his stepbrother. Vigilance had introduced him to Uncle Schomburgh, and the old man had stared at the ultimate ghost he both dreaded and loved.
    Vigilance had been a boy of thirteen when his father had taken Carroll’s mother into his house as his wife, the boy Carroll, her only child, being four or five years old then. Vigilance was the eldest of seven, and their mother had died a couple of months ago in her last childbirth. Carroll’s mother thus became the adoptive mother of the Vigilance brood who were lucky to get such a young woman and stepmother for the large family, the youngest of whom was an infant two months old.
    She was lucky too to find the protection of the Vigilance family for her child whose father no one had ever seen. The name the child bore was little-known in those parts. Her husband bore her no malice and wished her son to take his name as a final safeguard. This she resisted. She felt it would do no good – the name Carroll was as innocuous and distant a name as any she could choose. She did not wish to attract upon her head and the head of her new family the hoax of sin in an implacable future. Vigilance could not remember ever addressing his stepbrother as anything else but Carroll. In fact this habit of using the surname was the curious custom amongst most families in the enormous dreaming forest who dreaded mislaying and losing each other. After a time everybody believed Carroll’s name was a true one. It were as if they had a long and a short memory at one and the same time so that while they forgot the name Carroll’s mother had borne (as one is inclined to forget maiden names) they helped to invent and forge a name for her son which established distant ties they only dimly dreamt of. Carroll was one burning memory and substance for his mother and another dimmer incestuous substance and myth for his uncertain and unknown father folk. He had become a relative ghost for all as all ultimately became a ghost for everyone.
    It was a