The Incarnator

Max E. Keele

hat curious morning I had been called away from my books to comfort a family out in the Tracts. Like most in that place they were hard-working craftsfolk of modest means and I knew they would be pressed to accommodate my fee. But although I cannot deny some small occasional pang of guilt for the nature of my living, I cannot do what I do for free. I have expenses.

Truly, mine is a living not entirely unlike others, if somewhat better compensated. There are farmers to grow our food, smiths to make our tools, builders to build, soldiers to kill ... and me. The Incarnator. It is my lot to capture the soul of the departed, and--for a fee--reshape it into something else. It is a living.

So I gathered my tools, and dressed in my most sober robes, and hired a gig. The cabbie was one I knew, and we spent the two-hour drive amiably jawing over current events: the war in Andrea, the rising price of ambergris, football scores and the like.

He had just slowed the horse to pass the first gate when he turned 'round and in a low voice said, "Listen, sir, I don't mean no rudeness, or nothing, but can you tell?" He blushed, and gnawed his lip. "I mean, what's my soul gonna be? Can't you tell me?"

Really, I was quite stunned. I knew, of course, that nearly everyone held some curiosity, and that such speculation frequently filled the conversations of the idle. But no one had ever actually asked me. I suppose it was part superstition, part embarrassment, part fear--not really taboo, it just never happened. According to custom, as handed down through a thousand generations of Incarnators, I would tell a person the nature of their soul only at the moment of their death. As a last word of comfort, for each to know that existence would continue. But up until that day, not one person, dying or healthy, had ever asked. I should have considered it an omen.

I stalled for a bit, straightened my robes, turned all the rings on my left hand to align the glittering jewels, teased a golden comb through my beard. The common belief, you see, is not the entire truth, and when forced to tell lies, I prefer to think them through.

"My son, why do wish to know this? Your soul is what it is. When you breath your last, if someone is there to direct it, your soul will know just what to become."

"But you can see. Can't you? I mean, everyone says you can tell. Just by looking."

I shifted back and forth in my seat, looked past him at the palisade ahead, and the approaching second gate. "Yes," I finally said. "I can see. But I cannot tell." The gig clattered as the road became cobblestone. "How would it help you to know? If I named your essence, and it were something wonderful, like a vulture or a griff, would you not then believe your life is less precious? Or if it were otherwise, and your future would be as something less, say a wisp of fluff, would you not then dread your death the more?" And unsaid, but at the front of my thoughts: and would you not then instruct your heirs not to bother with the Incarnator and his fee?

He seemed accustomed to disappointment. He turned back to his reigns and slowed, showed his pass to the gatemen and clucked at the horse. We had turned past the usual tawdry strip of shops into the Tracts proper, where cheap identical houses line both sides of the narrow streets, when the driver again spoke. "Thank you, sir. You are certain wise. I guess I'd rather not know, after all." His tone betrayed him. Of course he still wanted to know. Everyone has always wanted to know. Everyone always will.

The gig pulled to stop before a house like all the others, sunbricked, straw thatched, and painted a uniform dusty beige. The main difference: twenty or so somber people milled about the yard with cups of coffee or sweet breads, whispering in knots of two or three. When they saw me descending in a furl of silken robes, a familiar silence washed over them. They parted at my approach, and though I smiled slightly at each, none would meet my gaze. They, like the cabbie, like everyone, ached to know the nature of their souls. And yet, they also, like everyone, feared the final disposition.

I entered the house, stood just inside the door. I announced myself with the booming ritual voice I had spent years perfecting. "The Incarnator is here, is he welcome?"

A small, bald man separated from the crowd. A girl, perhaps a year from the bloody trials of puberty, clung to his thin arm. They both bore the tired eyes of long-awaited tragedy. "You are welcome here." His voice creaked. The girl just stared at me with a completely illegible expression.

"Then I am grateful. I am come to help." I doffed my velvet hat with a sweep, held it before me and bowed.

As was custom, the man held out a purse, shook it to demonstrate its content, dropped it into the hat. I made a show of pocketing it without inspection, but I judged its weight and feel in an instant, and knew it to be the proper amount of gold.

"Thank you for coming," he said. "She's in here, and not got long."

I followed him and the girl into a cramped bedroom. A physician was pulling the last of his leeches from a bone-pale woman's ankles. He pushed the fat slug into a jar full of its ilk, and closed his kit. "I can't do anything more." He looked at me as if I were something less than his leeches. "I suppose it's your turn." Doctors, of course, hate me and my profession. They mistrust that which they cannot see, are suspicious of that which they cannot recreate, and jealous of those with more substantial professions.

I nodded imperiously, and waited with arms crossed for him to leave. When he had, I sat on the side of the bed, touched the dying woman's hand. "Hello, child. I am here to assist you."

She turned her head to me, and I saw that it was painful to move even that much. "I know who you are," she breathed. "I do not believe in you."

My jaw dropped. Twice in one day I had heard someone speak the unspeakable.

The man rushed to me, stammering. "Don't listen to her, she's delirious, don't pay her no mind, I'm sure she don't mean nothing by it...."

She cut him off with a withering glare. "I know my mind, husband. And I know that you have given this, this pompous charlatan all of our hard won savings...." She coughed, and dark flecks dotted her gown. "And for what? To mumble a few oaths, wave his soft hands, and pretend that I am a tree?" She closed her eyes and coughed some more.

"Please don't." The man began to cry. "You know I can't live without you. If you don't come back as something, I just don't know what I'll do!" He broke down completely, buried his face in the blankets at the foot of the bed, sobbing. The girl came to him, gently pulled him away.

"You had all best leave me to my work," I said, opening my bag. I had no intention of acknowledging the woman's outburst. It was simply too, well, disturbing. Even physicians, with all their envious distrust, did not dare disbelieve. I pulled out the tools of my trade, and laid them in a neat row along the edge of the bed. I heard the door close, and without looking up, I began.

The woman would not let me ignore her. "So," she said, her voice surprisingly strong. "What's it to be, then? Am I to become a brick? Or maybe a fruit fly? Ooh, I'd like that, I would. Nothing to do all day but buzz about, nothing to eat but ripe peaches. Only a day or two worth of lifespan to suffer the whole ridiculous mess."

I peered through the black glass, marked her forehead with a spot of ocher, opened her gown and measured the diameter of her left nipple.

"Does that make you stiff, you old goat? Tell you what, after I'm dead, why don't you just have me? I won't be able to tell no one, I'll be a feather, or a rock, or a toad. Won't I, now?"

I set the calipers aside, wiped my brow, and sighed. "My child, I know you find this process, well, uncomfortable, but my services are paid for, and they will be completed. Please don't upset yourself further."

"Upset myself?" She barked a note of laughter that quickly became a racking cough. Bloody phlegm sprayed across my collection of apparatus. I winced.

She gained some control, but I could tell she was almost finished. "Your services consist of fairy dung, you fraud. What lie will you tell my husband and my child?"

I began to unfold the fine mesh net with clipped, measured movements. "Child, I can understand your fear. No one wants to die. That is why I am here. Your family loves you so much that they will sacrifice greatly to see you live again. Is that so hard to bear?"

"So noble!" Her voice dwindled to a crackling whisper. "I begin to wonder, fraud: do you actually believe your own absurd mythos? Do you really think that you wield some power over my essence? You are a cheat, and a liar, and a bloodsucker worse than those the doctor just pulled from my flesh."

I could not prevent the fierce whisper that escaped my lips. "Watch your tongue woman. I hold more power than you could ever believe."

And in my anger I saw her die, saw her spirit separating from her, watched its struggles to be free, and I told her, with some cruel satisfaction: "Your soul is a blind, squirming fish trapped in a cold pond in a deep cave, doomed to circle endlessly, with naught but filth to eat."

"No." The strong, surprising voice came from the foot of the bed. The girl had been there all along, crouched down and listening.

I struggled with the net. "You mustn't be here!" I shouted. "This is not for you to see!"

"No," she said again, and this time I noticed that her tiny hands held a remarkably ordinary pistol, and it was cocked and primed. "That will not do. You will make my mother something free and beautiful, or you will end your life here and now, with no one to incarnate you at all."

"But my child," I frantically replayed the last few moments, searching for what I may have said, what she may have heard. "I cannot choose what a soul becomes! You must believe that!"

"What I believe is neither here, nor there," she said, with preternatural calm. "What matters is what my poor father believes. If you tell him you have taken his savings, and any hope of a better life, only to turn my mother into a wretched fish, he will die of grief, and you will die of bullet wounds, and then I will die of hanging, and there will be uncollected souls flying all about the place."

I knew then, that this girl was the image of her mother. That as impossible as it sounded, two women had come into the world capable of utter disbelief.

"Very well." I folded the net crudely, shoved it, the black glass, the calipers, and the rest into my bag. "I will tell him whatever you wish."

She looked at me through squinted eyes. "Just like that? You admit your falseness that easily?"

I sighed, and stood. "I admit nothing. But as I wish to live, I will agree to your demands. What shall I say has become of your mother's soul?"

She didn't hesitate, knew exactly what to say. "Tell him that she is become a ruby, like the one on your little finger. Give him the stone, and let him keep it near him for the rest of his days." She reacted to something in my face with an intense, contemptuous grimace. "Don't worry, I will see that it is returned to you upon my father's death."

I did as she wished. It made the small man smile to hear that his beloved wife had become an exquisite gem, and it made him cry for joy when I offered to let him keep the stone I had only just pried from my ring. The girl gave no sign of her role; she merely hugged her father's side with one hand discretely beneath her apron. Everyone seemed quite pleased, and I left in a cloud of relief and gratitude.

I will admit that it was not the ending I had expected of that day, with its peculiar twists and odd portents, with its disturbing implications about the faith of the people, and their respect for my profession. All in all, though, it was a tolerable end. The job was done, payments received. I rode the long journey home in silence, and settled in with a glass of wine, and returned to my book.

But it was hard to concentrate on the reading. I just could not help thinking about that poor blind fish, trapped deep in the Earth. Swimming cold black waters, alone, in utter disbelief, to the end of her days. And though I felt some pity, I felt no remorse at all.

It is, after all, a living.

--end--

Originally published in Shadowshow, 2001.