Free The Carnival Trilogy by Wilson Harris

flame had drawn on the hull of Night.
    One etching ran through the irregularity of the coal-black ship into an Arawak trading post that had been erected in the first decade of the sixteenth century. The Arawaks hadresponded to a couple of Portuguese vessels that had appeared in the New Forest river. They had felled trees to create premises that would later become the New Forest Market square. They had lit a flame there, flame-clock of an age that seemed now, as I stood on the schooner of 1926, an ancestral spike in Masters’ torch.
    The Arawak flame-clock was bright as I looked back upon it. So bright I scarcely discerned additional reinforcement and blaze from Portugal and Spain. They claimed they had come to protect the alien cultures they had taken under their wings. They plundered, they raped, and yet a glimmering fiction of mutual desire for protective law, protective spirit, left its initial nebulous score on the vessel of Night on which I now stood long after the circumnavigation of the globe.
    I sought therefore to trace with Masters’ torch the blackened initials of god, of fiction-globe, fiction-law, within a collision of cultures. I sought to trace an initial unity of Mankind that was so nebulous it ran through every timepiece of frozen fire one wore on one’s wrist (as on the broken body of generations) within fragmented conventions and treaties, false clarities, false economic ideals.
    It was this nebulosity of initial grace that deepened the fire in my eyes. I needed to descend with the vessel of Night into accompanying initials of the mastery of the globe, master-builder , master-philosopher, master-salesman, master of arts. I needed to descend with the schooner of Night into equally related initials of the servant of the globe, servant-builder, servant-philosopher, servant of arts. How creatively interchangeable were they – mastery and service – upon the unborn/born person in the Carnival body of space? I needed to descend into eclipsed initials of the rebirth of spirit within Masters and Thomas and Alice and the marble woman and numerous others. We were partial figures on the deck of Night. Such partial figuration of soul was a signal of terrifying wholeness. Terrifying in an age that had settled for fragmentation, for polarization, as the basis of security.
    In confessing to such partiality and terrifying comedy ofwholeness, I sensed the protective veil of which Masters had spoken. I looked through the blackened fire into the ships the Arawaks had seen. Night fell in consistency with the ship of Night moored to the Market-place of the globe. The Spanish came in that Night, then the French, then the Dutch, then the English, then the Americans, and in 1926 – on the very dream-day, dream-night, of the burning schooner and the capsized basket of eggs – a Russian vessel appeared and anchored in New Forest mid-river. It confirmed Flatfoot Johnny’s claim to be czar of Carnival. But the Russian czar was dead and a generation at least was to pass for him to be resurrected in embalmed Lenin.
    In 1926, the Market Carnival, over which Johnny presided, had been untouched by the day’s fire, but something incalculable – a cosmic wind perhaps that had been blowing for ages upon savage heart, savage treaty, savage trade – gave to its iron railings and skeletal arches, its wooden frames and stalls, the proportions of a twin or cousin to the vessel of Night. The Market seemed, therefore, equally gutted, equally afloat in space. The czar Johnny was proceeding with an enormous bag aloft on his shoulders. He was a man of prodigious strength, grotesquely muscular, grotesquely powerful. His prime defect was an awkwardness of pace, so awkward it made him seem old and crippled as he shuffled along. And then of course one saw his muscles and his back that seemed peculiarly incongruous then, incongruous youth cemented upon incongruous age.
    His awkward foot was the gift of the false shaman. It fired his ambition to