by Adam Blake
‘No,’ Kuutma said. ‘You don’t.’
‘Yes,’ Diema insisted. ‘To report.’
‘I’ve heard your report, Diema. And now this is in my hands. Step outside. I’ve deliberated, in the matter of your pregnancy, and I’ve reached a verdict. The only verdict possible, if you’re to escape censure. The boy’s death protects your honour. The other deaths were already agreed on before you ever left Ginat’Dania. But there’s no need for you to be present for this. I understand that it might distress you to see these people, who’ve fought at your side, lose their lives. Go. Go to the gates of the compound and wait for me there.’
Sour bile rose in Diema’s mouth and she swallowed it down again.
‘Tannanu,’ she said, the words scouring her throat like gravel, ‘I wish to speak. My testimony is pertinent to these matters. Hear me out.’
They held the tableau for some seconds. If Kuutma saw the tension in her posture, and if he understood what it meant, he gave no sign.
‘Very well,’ he said at last.
He gave clipped commands. Messengers came forward to remove Tillman from her grasp and to take hold of Kennedy and Rush.
‘Son of a bitch!’ Kennedy yelled. She threw a wild glance at Diema, who ignored it. Their fates rested with Kuutma now.
He walked aside a little way, beckoning her to follow him. Diema obeyed.
‘I’m listening,’ Kuutma said, dropping the mantle of formality. ‘But there’s no way of stopping this, little sister. You must know that.’
‘Brother,’ Diema said, staring full into his eyes, ‘there is. You’re Kuutma, the Brand, and what you say will happen here is what will happen. Nobody will argue with you.’
Kuutma shrugged brusquely. ‘That’s irrelevant. I can’t gainsay what I’ve already said. They’re going to die.’ He breathed out slowly, a breath that was almost a sigh. ‘I can see that these three have come to mean something to you – I saw that back in Budapest. And I grieve for you. You’ve known enough loss in your life already. But Kennedy’s death, and Tillman’s, were part of the task you accepted. Be strong, now, and see it through. As for the boy, even if you love him, you’ll forget him soon enough. Take another lover. Take a husband, even. Desh Nahir would embrace you in an instant.’
Diema ignored this grotesque suggestion, and stuck remorselessly to her point. ‘Tannanu, Leo Tillman is my father.’
‘No, Diema, he is not. He’s only—’
‘He is the father of my flesh and the father of my spirit. He is the only father I acknowledge. I cleave to him, as his daughter, and I will stand by him. The hand that’s raised to hurt him becomes, with that act, my enemy’s hand. On Gellert Hill, he fought for me and would have died for me, though we had but an hour’s acquaintance. I knew then that he had loved the child he lost, and that therefore he could not knowingly have killed my brothers. That was some terrible mistake, as the rhaka Kennedy told me it was. The monster whose death I assented to never existed – and to my father’s death, Tannanu, I do not assent.’
Kuutma listened to this speech with a look of sombre concern. When it was finished, he said nothing for a long time.
Finally, he reached out and put a hand on Diema’s shoulder.
‘I’ve done you no service,’ he said heavily. ‘I see that now. I love you and honour you, Diema, but I put you in the way of this hurt, and now I don’t see how to make it pass from you.’
‘Let them live.’
‘I can’t do that. I’m not free to choose.’
‘Then neither am I,’ Diema said. She drew a sica from its sheath against her breast and placed it so that the tip of the blade touched her stomach. ‘Kill Leo Tillman and I’ll die, too.’
Kuutma’s eyes widened in horror. ‘Diema,’ he said, his voice almost a whisper. ‘You can’t mean it.’
‘I mean it.’
Many emotions crossed Kuutma’s face. The one that was most clearly visible was pain. ‘A blasphemy,’ he said.
‘I’m damned already. On Gellert Hill, I shot Hifela, of the Elohim, and watched him die. And I lied to you in Budapest, Tannanu. I’m not pregnant. I said that to save the boy, and the boy just saved us all.’ She wrestled with words, with reasons, trying to explain something that had come to her without the benefit of either, as a rising tide of revelation. ‘If I let them die,’ she said, ‘I become less than they are. Less than I thought they were, when I didn’t know them.’
Kuutma’s face still bore the same expression of dismay and suffering. ‘I could disarm you,’ he pointed out.
‘Possibly. But you couldn’t keep me disarmed.’ She put the knife away, to reinforce the point. ‘I don’t have to die here or now, Tannanu. I’ve got all the time in the world. If I decide to kill myself, the only way to stop me is to kill me first.’
Silence fell between them. They stared at one another, intransigent, immovable.
With no more sound than a whisper of fabric, Alus and Taria appeared to either side of Diema.
‘Desh Nahir will live,’ Alus said.
‘And he has withdrawn his execration,’ Taria added. ‘He wishes no harm to Diema Beit Evrom.’
Kuutma nodded. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Secure Diema Beit Evrom and confiscate her weapons.’
The two women did as they were told. Diema made no protest and she didn’t struggle, as Alus held her hands behind her back and Taria methodically searched her for weapons. The tall woman’s eyes met hers and she could see how little they liked to treat one of their own in this way.
‘Guard her,’ Kuutma said.
Taria nodded. ‘Yes, Kuutma. What about the rhaka and the others? Should we—’
‘Do nothing,’ Kuutma said. ‘I wish to speak with Leo Tillman.’
Following Kuutma’s curt instructions, his Messengers overturned one of the plastic tubs, tipping out the thin paste at the bottom of it, and rolled it to a distant corner of the room, far from the others. Tillman was half-dragged and half-carried across and set down on the tub, where in due course Kuutma joined him.
Tillman was still in a great deal of pain, but Alus’s medical skills had once again been called into service. She had made up a cocktail of drugs designed to help him manage the pain and stay conscious. His fully dilated pupils and the morbid tension of his posture suggested that they were just starting to kick in.
Kuutma stared down at the Adamite, with the puzzled frown of a mathematician considering a problem in formal logic.
‘I had a plan,’ he said, ‘that included your death. Yours, and the woman’s.’
Tillman nodded.
‘It’s true that your death was only a detail,’ Kuutma continued. ‘It was a way of dealing with a situation that my predecessor had allowed to arise. The main thrust of the plan related to much clearer and more present dangers.’
He hesitated a moment, then sat beside the Adamite man. It enabled him to lower his voice a little further: all of the Messengers present had recently taken prodigious doses of kelalit, which enhances the senses, so there was a possibility, despite the discreet distance, that they were being overheard.
‘I wish,’ Kuutma said, ‘that I’d killed you first and found some different way to solve my remaining problems.’
Tillman laughed shortly – a single snort. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘well, that just sums you people up, it seems to me. You always over-think these things, and you always make the same mistake.’
Kuutma scowled, but kept his tone even and controlled. ‘And what mistake is that, Mr Tillman?’
Tillman ran a hand over his sweating face and blinked several times, rapidly. The drugs he’d been given were interfering with his perception, or his thought-processes, or both.
‘She’s pretty amazing, isn’t she?’
‘What?’ Kuutma asked, thrown.
‘My little girl. She’s a real piece of work. I’d hazard a guess that maybe that goes for all the women in her family. She reminds me a lot of my wife.’
‘Rebecca Beit Evrom was not
your wife.’
‘No?’
‘No. The relationship between a Kelim woman and an Adamite out-father is not characterised as marriage, in our laws. What mistake is it that you think we make, Mr Tillman?’
Still blinking, Tillman turned his head to stare at Kuutma. ‘There’s a kind of a proverb. You must have heard of it. It says if you’ve only got a hammer in your toolbox, everything looks like a nail.’
‘I’m familiar with that observation.’
‘You’ve spent two thousand years killing anyone who gets onto you or gets too close to the truth about you. Playing ducks and drakes with history.’
‘We do what we have to do.’
‘No,’ Tillman said, his voice slurring a little. ‘You do what you already know how to do. You don’t change your repertoire, even when you can see that it’s not working.’
‘It’s worked well enough so far,’ Kuutma said.
Tillman laughed again. ‘Then why do you even exist? If it worked, Kuutma, if it had ever worked, they wouldn’t need you. Thousands of years of surreptitious murder, and every time, every damn time … as soon as you finish one operation it’s all got to be done again. Hundreds of Elohim with their ears to the ground, all across the world, trying to keep track of a whisper line with seven billion voices on it. Of course you’re going to make a pig’s breakfast out of it.’
‘You’re saying there’s a better way?’ Kuutma asked sardonically.
‘Yes.’
‘Teach me, Tannanu Tillman.’
‘Well, for starters,’ Tillman said, ‘you don’t squash the story. You shout it. Flood the world with rumours about the Judas People, about Ginat’Dania. Tell everyone about the secret book, the lost gospel. Tell them if they read it, pale men who weep blood will find them and kill them with knives that were last seen twenty centuries ago. Tell them about the beautiful women who’ll sleep with you and then disappear, leaving you to grow crazy with searching for them. Tell them about the underground city, and all the rest of it.’
‘Why?’ Kuutma demanded, mystified. ‘Why would we do these things?’
‘Because the world’s full of lies,’ Tillman said. ‘Full to the brim and slopping over. And when your story’s out there, it looks like one more lie. It has its hour, and then it’s stale, and then it’s dead, and everyone moves on to the next big thing. “You’re still trying to sell that Judas People bullshit? Seriously? There’s this new book says Jesus was a woman!” That’s what you need. That saturated, been-there, heard-it feeling. And it’s so easy to get. All you’ve got to do is face the same way everyone else is facing, so you get lost in the crowd. Whereas what you’re doing now is pushing against the grain the whole time. Not only is it a lot harder that way, but every time you move, every time you do anything, you make another trail that somebody could follow.’
The speech seemed to have used up all of Tillman’s remaining strength. He bowed his head onto his chest and closed his eyes.
Kuutma stood, and – after a moment’s irresolution – moved away.
‘Let me speak to her, one more time,’ Tillman said.
Kuutma paused. ‘Why?’
‘To say goodbye.’
‘She doesn’t need to say goodbye to you. She’s made her peace with your death.’
Tillman made a weary, broken gesture with his hand. ‘If you say so. I know you people can’t lie.’
No, Kuutma thought, staring down at the wounded man, we can’t.
Except to ourselves.
70
The flight back to London was funereal. And the fact that they were in business class just made it surreal, too.
Any time that Rush could think of anything to say, Kennedy replied with monosyllables. And he didn’t blame her, because the things that he could think of to say were all wrong. Small talk. Desperate verbal swerves, taking them away as far as possible from the one topic that they couldn’t discuss.
Why did we let them do that to him?
Why didn’t they do it to me?
The stewardess came by and offered them champagne. Kennedy didn’t even seem to hear. Rush shook his head emphatically.
‘We’re good,’ he lied. ‘We’re fine. Thanks.’
71
Kennedy didn’t phone ahead and tell Izzy that she was coming. The fact was that she was scared to. Scared of words more than anything, at this point, because the first thing she’d done when she finally touched down at Heathrow was to catch up on a whole week of Izzy’s texts.
She’d never been an archaeologist, but she’d met some. It felt like archaeology.
Unearthing the evidence of a vanished way of life.
Izzy’s tone going from chatty to bitter to resigned to valedictory.
And the dark ages, which was Tuesday and Wednesday and today, when there were no messages, no signs of life at all.
She took the train up to Leicester. She didn’t trust herself to drive. A taxi took her from the station to Knighton, the driver bending her ear about something or other the whole way, except that she didn’t hear a word, so technically her ears were unbent.
She told him to wait. She might not be here long.
Caroline answered on the third ring. She was surprised to see Kennedy, and judging from how thin the line of her lips got, it wasn’t the kind of surprise that makes you squeal for joy.
‘Hello, Heather.’
‘Hi, Caroline.’ Kennedy considered and abandoned various feeble conversational gambits. ‘Is Izzy there? I … I’d like to talk to her. Just for a minute.’
Caroline nodded and withdrew. Kennedy stood on the doorstep in a light summer drizzle, listening to footsteps echo through the big house, fainter and fainter.
She didn’t hear Izzy’s footsteps approaching, because Izzy was in her socks. She was just there, suddenly. The door was flung open and she was up in Kennedy’s face, in Kennedy’s arms, kissing her with a ferocity that was going to leave bruises.
They stayed like that for a long time. Caroline came into the hallway behind them and watched for a moment or two in stony-faced silence, like Lot’s wife looking back at the cities of the plain. Then she went away again.
‘I screwed up,’ Kennedy said, when Izzy finally allowed her the free use of her mouth. ‘But I love you, Iz. I can’t imagine not having you in my life. If you give me another chance, I’ll never push you away again.’
‘I knew it,’ Izzy murmured in Kennedy’s ear.
‘Knew what?’
‘That if I held out for long enough, you’d find some way that it was your fault I shagged that boy. You’re a genius, babe. That’s why I need you.’
They kissed some more, but then Izzy pulled her face away from the lip-lock to stare down the drive towards the street.
‘Have you got a taxi waiting?’
‘Oh,’ Kennedy said. ‘Yeah.’
‘Thank God. Let’s go.’
72
That the eyes should be red was licence, of a kind. It was a way of saying something that needed to be said, even if it wasn’t what she was seeing.
But there was a problem with the blacks, Diema decided.
Both of the women had such lustrous hair that she couldn’t catch the richness and the fullness of it with the pigments and the techniques she knew.
By way of a partial solution, she drew them in stylised form, their hair solid black with solid bars of white for the highlights, their muscles limned in feathered greys on the perfect whiteness of their skin.
‘I’ve got to move,’ Alus moaned. ‘My nose is itching.’
‘Your nose probably isn’t in the picture,’ Taria said. ‘The canvas isn’t that big.’
When she finally let them see the picture, they were baffled. ‘It looks like something a little kid would do,’ Taria said. ‘But … it works, somehow. It’s like the way you’d say something, and everyone would know you were exaggerating, but they’d see the truth underneath the exaggeration. It’s like that, but in a picture.’
Diema
blushed. ‘In the Nations,’ she said, ‘they call a drawing in this style a cartoon.’
‘My two-year-old son paints just like this,’ Alus said. ‘You think I could call it a cartoon and sell it?’
Diema might have bridled at the insult, but she laughed and let it pass. She was still amazed that they had agreed to pose for her, and she was anxious not to do anything that might make them change their minds. Not only was she finally getting to paint them, as she’d wanted to do ever since she first met them, but they were also her only source of news about her father.
They talked about him now, as she prepared a meal of bread and olives for her two models, who were putting their clothes back on in a corner of the studio. It was a very large studio. Space wasn’t so much sought after down here in het retoyet, at the bottom of Ginat’Dania.
‘He’s going on about windows now,’ Alus said. ‘Why can’t he have any windows? It’s driving him crazy that he doesn’t have a view. He’s four hundred feet underground and he wants a view. So Kuutma, instead of telling him to shove it up his arse, says “What view would you like, Mr Tillman? What is it that you want to be looking at?” And Leo goes “I don’t know, maybe a lake or something.” And the next time I go in, Kuutma’s fixed up a live video feed from Lake Michigan. And you know what Leo says?’
‘He says, “There’s no sound!”’ Taria broke in, stepping on Alus’s punchline. ‘He says he likes the water, but it’s not real without the sound. So Kuutma turns around and says to Alus—’
‘Call Michigan. See if there’s any way they can put a microphone in.’
Both women were laughing uproariously. This was their favourite kind of story about Tillman – the kind where he did something outrageous or curmudgeonly or inexplicable. The kind where he was like an exotic pet, with exotic needs and neurotic, high-maintenance habits.
In Ginat’Dania at large, Diema knew, her father was seen very differently. He was the prisoner in the tower, the monster caged, the trophy that Kuutma had brought back after vanquishing Ber Lusim and saving the city. And more, he was the former enemy forced now to toil at the wheel, to labour for the People though it broke his proud heart and gravelled his spirit.