The Tree of the Sun by Wilson Harris Read Free Book Online

Leonard under the trees. “A body of years and yet it’s as fleeting as a bullet. My old man used to say a hundred years are as fleeting as an arrow that flies from hand to heart.”
    “I always think of cannon as huge beasts,” said Eleanor expressing an implicit preference for the hand in the cradle, coup d’état by Leonard’s milk bottles. Yet she shuddered a little in the canvas da Silva was painting as though a cat’s rippling tread of populations moved upon her flesh in Leonard’s dancing tread as he seemed to advance towards her from under the trees. The breeze strengthened and the painting fell upon a mimic battlefield. (It was a fantasy of love and hate Harlequin entertained when they were out in the open together.)
    She lay there, lovely and prostrate, half-slain, her legs raised to the bullet of history until da Silva lifted her into an upright position against the foot of his easel. An advancing army, on milk-bottle horseback, applauded and Harlequin’s inner eye, in painted canvas, took aim at Leonard. He (Harlequin) elected to coffin himself in space, as she (Eleanor) reclined at his feet, and to be at liberty to patrol the air above her like a brilliant centaur in his own right in the sky; a brilliant conversion of wizards and witches into broomstick technologies and metamorphoses of resurrection in science.
    Nothing was demanded of him except a satellite of appearances and disappearances, the trick of terrestrial andsuper-terrestrial battlefields, an opera of love and war through clay and gold and bottle-necked glass and rockets to the stars.
    His apparent detachment—his air of non-existence in the upper air as Eleanor reclined on the ground (and Leonard bestrode a bottle), the air he cultivated that he had never been born, had been extinguished by a phantom bullet from a gun in the middle of a modern or ancient war his father fought—ignited a sensual flare, a sensual target of undreamt-of promiscuities, bodies and limbs scattered far and wide on a painting of green.
    Perhaps an element of summer telepathy was at stake which inscribed his thoughts into a sculpture of non-existences , a sublimation of existences, grounded in meaningful obscurities of motive or action, gunplay in the ancient Wild West, film of violence, escapism through violence.
    Shared thoughts of the box in his head, the bed in his sky, centred on his father’s handcannon as uncertain cradle or trigger of annunciation to smite the world with the lightning madness of the human species, the lightning gaiety of the human species, obsessional codes of the lost king (the lost queen) of space that Francis mourned in backward resurrections of Harlequin’s body before he was born and had been conceived to die….
    “I always think of cannon as huge beasts,” Eleanor insisted .
    “Huge beasts? Are they?” Harlequin caught himself. “Not at all. Three-handed but not huge. We’re back in the fifteenth century, remember? The issue then was not size but the additional component one required in order to take aim, to fire. Each target one slew, each body one killed, survived in a ghostly mechanic at one’s side. That was my father’s vision of the future in the past.”
    “I always think of cannon …” Eleanor insisted.
    “Handcannon,” Harlequin cried. “Handcannon my love. Quite small really. The bore is less than an inch, the barrel just over a foot. Devil to fire. And so an additional hand, called a serpentine, an ‘S’-shaped piece, was builtagainst the stock. There stood one’s ghostly mechanic, my dear lady-in-waiting Eleanor. It was he or it who held the lighted match—as if it were the first or last star or sun in the hand of creation—and moved it by degrees to ignite the powder one had primed into the barrel of one’s gun. And so one’s hands were free to devote themselves to aligning the gun, to taking aim, some sort of rudimentary aim. One aimed at the enemy with both hands. In the meantime a fraction of a