Theatre of the Gods

by M. Suddain

  ‘There’s only one explanation for all this,’ the old man said, standing quickly. ‘The Pope has somehow stolen her and taken her above.’

  ‘How do you come to such a conclusion?’ said Fabrigas the younger. Fabrigas the elder pointed to a line scrawled among the chalk symbols: ‘Have taken the Devil Gurl prisoner. U R a bumface. Pope.’

  ‘OK then. We need a rescue plan. We must get to the launch bays so we can steal a ship and go into space. We should probably hurry.’ They had used Cyclops! to block the entrance to the cave complex, but now they heard the sound of the Pope’s men attempting to haul it aside.

  ‘This is where I have to leave you,’ said Kimmy.

  ‘What? Don’t be foolish, you’ll be killed!’ said Fabrigas Number One, the elder.

  ‘I’ll be fine. I need to find my prince.’

  ‘The prince? That little snotface?’

  ‘Oh, he’s not so bad when you get to know him. And it really is hard to find a good man. In any universe. You two look after each other. Here, Dr Dray said to give you this,’ and she handed the old man a star-shaped object. It was silvery, rough-backed, with a salty sea smell, and it immediately moulded itself into the old-beard’s great palm. ‘He said he found it in his lab this morning.’

  ‘This is getting ridiculous,’ said Fabrigas. He peeled it off his palm and slipped it into his cloak.

  ‘All the best,’ said the girl.

  All the best. As if she was signing off a friendly note.

  ‘She seems a rather unique person,’ said Fabrigas One as he watched her walk off down the tunnels and into the darkness.

  *

  As it turns out, Lenore had indeed gone for a stroll. She was wandering the streets of Diemendääs, the once peaceful streets now torn open in wide, smoking gashes. She seemed oblivious to the destruction, but the man walking behind her, the man who had brought all this destruction, was not. The Pope bobbed and winced as his own bombs fell from above and towers crumbled all around them. The Pope had made up his mind the night before that he would wait for the Well Dressed Man to leave his mountain cave, then seize the prisoner, no questions. He didn’t know exactly what had put the thought inside his mind, or how he’d got free of the Well Dressed Man’s enslavement.

  The Devil Girl walked a few paces ahead. She was his prisoner, he had been ordered to bring her to justice, and no one would talk him out of it. Not this time anyway. ‘Walk somewhat faster, if you please,’ said his prisoner. ‘We have not much time.’ Above, a rocket punched through a snow machine, and it came spinning down, sending out streams of white like a Catherine wheel before it smashed into the side of the mountain.

  When he’d gone to the Well Dressed Man’s mountain chamber the Pope had found it empty. Empty except for the child in her tiny cell. Her cell wasn’t even a cage: just some markings on the floor – markings to keep devils in, he knew. He’d wandered, bemused, around the chamber, the table stacked with leather-bound books. ‘Pah!’ he’d said. He’d taken up a large volume on modern philosophy and leafed through it, perplexed. Then he’d lifted a heavy fountain pen from the stand on the antique table, and after the phrase ‘Language is the mother of all thought’, he’d written, ‘… and you smell.’ Then he’d scuffed away a few of the symbols on the floor with his shoe. His sleeping prisoner had opened her eyes suddenly, smiled a terrible smile, and said, ‘Hello there. I see you got my mind-message.’

  A few minutes later the bombardment from space had started. The Pope had a simple standing order in place: ‘If they give us any trouble, bomb them to hell.’ His standing order did not take into account his spontaneously and secretly travelling to the city. Battle Command had no idea the Holy Father had gone down to the surface, so had no hesitation in commencing the bombardment when they got word that an iron giant was creating havoc. ‘Little girl,’ the Pope said, ‘I think it is very dangerous for us to be down here.’ His own men, picking themselves up bloody from the rubble, or locked in the claws of giant insects, looked with disbelieving eyes as the pair passed by and vanished into the smoke.

  ‘What mean you, sir? This is all just a minor fuss, for sure, no?’

  ‘A minor fuss?’ The Pope looked up just in time to see one of his bombs slam into a temple, sending a gargoyle head spinning down the avenue, gouging a canyon in the paved street before skidding to a stop; its ancient eyes locked with theirs.

  ‘I would like to leave now very much!’

  ‘We will leave soon,’ said the girl. ‘You will have your trial. We just have to make one stop first.’

  *

  The Black Widow had not expected this. She was behaving like a fool. A damned fool. But she felt she had no choice. She’d willed her limbs to take her on to the docking bays to meet the explorer, but instead she found herself scrambling up the vines that clung to the side of the Emperor’s residence, dropping lightly onto the patio. The bright explosions from the city lit her from behind.

  ‘Hello, Heronmus.’

  ‘Maria. I knew you’d come.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well then.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  In fiction, the dialogue is very dramatic. It flows wonderfully and is full of ardour, as if the poets themselves were whispering in the ears of the participants. But in real life, words spoken are stilted, awkward. The Emperor stood on the balcony, in his morning suit.

  ‘Why are you not helping your people? They are dying.’

  ‘I can do nothing to help them. I’m powerless. The insect legions have risen up of their own accord. I do not sanction their revolt.’

  ‘Well, I only have a few moments. I just wanted to stop by to tell you that I hate you.’

  ‘You hate me?’

  They had to shout above the sound of the bombardment.

  ‘Yes. I hate you with a burning passion. You are arrogant, aloof. I hate that you betrayed us. I hate that you betrayed your city. I hate that you act as if you have all the problems in the world when in fact you have everything a man could wish for. Don’t speak!’ The Emperor closed his mouth. Behind them the aerial battle was filling the sky with white-hot fire, but neither had eyes for it. ‘I hate everything that’s possible to hate about you. Most of all I hate the way you make me forget myself. You make me forget who I am and what I’m supposed to be doing. And I hate that. I guess that’s everything.’

  ‘Well then.’

  ‘Well then indeed.’ She realised she’d been clutching a handful of vine leaves this whole time, clutching them so hard that their juice ran between her fingers. She released them over the edge of the balcony and watched them flutter away like moths. A doomed fighter streaked by, leaving a coil of smoke. She heard the Emperor move closer behind her, but not too close. He stood a few feet away. ‘I really hate you,’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ replied the Emperor. ‘I hate you too.’

  FORBIDDEN ZONE

  ‘Someone’s coming,’ said the Black Widow.

  ‘I hear nothing,’ said the Emperor, but a second later he heard the footsteps in the corridor outside his suite. The Black Widow wound her long hair back up behind her head in a single deft twist and checked herself once in the mirror. ‘Tell me where the box with the Forbidden Zone is kept.’

  ‘It’s in a security complex beside the Museum of Doomsday Devices, but I urge you not to go. The place is filled with deadly traps.’ They heard the footsteps stop outside. The Emperor went to the door, put his hand to the latch and said, ‘It’s him. You’ll need to hide,’ but when he turned round she was gone.

  *

  The Black Widow made short work of the guards outside the complex, disabled the sentinel automatons by blowing fountain water into their workings through a bamboo reed, charmed the warning-crickets and prevented them from crying out by imitating their mating call, scaled the outer walls, cracked the exploding locks on the upper levels, scattered fine dust to reveal the sonic beams whose breaking would send a signal to the guardhouse, slo
wed her heartbeat so that its rhythm wouldn’t register on the sensitive seismographs placed within, went in silently by crawling along on her belly like a snake, then dropped as gently as a butterfly into the main enclosure – all as she’d been taught to do in her first year of spy school.

  In the centre of the room was a plinth upon which sat a black box, roughly the dimensions of a jewellery box, only slightly larger, and a slightly different shape, and of course without any visible joins or hinges, and in fact, on reflection, not much like a jewellery box at all. Also, it contained not jewels, but a universe.

  Inside, somewhere, was their captain, possibly dead, possibly cuddling a bear for warmth, but almost certainly sulking.

  There would be a final trap, of course. But what? Poison darts that made her sing for the guards? A snare of some kind? She lifted the box and found a note underneath:

  Dearest plums,

  I couldn’t let you steal our Forbidden Zone. You are breathing a nerve toxin which will kill you within an hour. The antidote is held at the royal surgery. This building is surrounded by a small army. If you surrender to them they’ll escort you to the antidote.

  All the best!

  Dray

  The Black Widow said a word under her breath.

  *

  ‘I am very disappointed,’ said the visitor. ‘Very.’ Before adding, ‘Very.’ And then, ‘Disappointed.’ This visitor had spent the last few days locked in a battle of minds and was not in a good mood.

  ‘I know you are,’ said the Emperor, ‘but things were beyond my control. You have no –’

  ‘Enough,’ said the well-dressed stranger, whose eyelids flickered and whose lip was a thin blue chalk mark on a green wall. ‘Where is my captain? I want him.’

  ‘He is in a box held in a high-security annexe near the Museum of Doomsday Devices. It wasn’t my fault. There was nothing I could do.’

  ‘Of course, of course.’ She steepled her fingers over her lips and crossed her legs, leaned back in the Emperor’s big leather chair. It was terrifyingly uncanny to the Emperor the way this small girl had adopted the mannerisms, even the speech patterns, of her well-dressed interrogator. It was a pleasant morning and the breeze moved the curtains in the Emperor’s study. ‘I perhaps spoke harshly. Is it not terribly vexing to manage a city? Probably. So many jaunty problems.’ The words wiggled from her mouth like bright snakes. ‘I’ve only been here for a short time and already I’m finding it … stressful.’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ said the Emperor. It seemed like he knew it for the first time.

  The stranger, in her elegantly trimmed hunting coat and boots, had learned much from the man she had met in the past few days, much about how to control the many feelings of the animal mind, much about how to control her own animal feelings, much about power, passion, revenge.

  ‘So much stress. So many problems, so many difficult questions. And your lovely wife’s … conditions. It would weigh upon a man. All the things that jump out at you on a daily basis. A man who’s reached your heights must be afraid of falling.’

  ‘Yes. It’s a long way to fall from the top.’

  ‘Yes. But when you fall it’s over. No pressures. No disasters. No armies upon your gate. You can rest. This is the way, yes. Kings go marching up up up, they fall down down down, again and again and again.’

  The Emperor looked towards the open window, the gently huffing curtains, the sky, the towers crumbling in the distance, the explosions ripping through the morning air. So warm, so pretty, so inviting.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

  And then he was gone.

  ‘I said you would pay,’ said Lenore to the waving curtains, the vacant chair behind the desk, to the empty air. She went to the door and found the Pope waiting like a loyal dog in the hallway.

  ‘And now we can go, yes?’ said the Pope.

  Lenore walked to the balcony. She carefully sniffed the air and smiled. ‘Roberto. He is coming soon. We must go and rescue my captain.’

  ‘OK then.’

  When the small girl and her befuddled Pope arrived at the high-security installation they found it surrounded by troops. ‘The Pope commands you tell him what happened here,’ said Lenore to a bewildered soldier.

  ‘There was a break-in,’ said the soldier. ‘Some crazy woman stole the box with the Forbidden Zone.’

  ‘You let her escape?’

  ‘Nothing we could do. She took off from the roof on a stolen set of rocket wings. Silly cow.’

  Lenore’s eyes narrowed. She made a small gesture towards the young soldier who slapped himself in the face – hard. She closed her eyes and concentrated for a second. ‘Yes. She’ll follow that wizard man into space. He has gone up to rescue me. And I’m down here. And the whole darned thing is topsy-turvy.’ Then she turned to the Pope, who looked more than ever like a child of the universe, laid before him both her slender wrists and said, ‘I am your prisoner now. Let us go up into space and have your trial.’

  OH, AND THE CAPTAIN

  Elsewhere, in the space between space, in a zone neither within nor without this universe, Captain Lambestyo sat completely unaware of the eventuating chaos. He didn’t know that the universe he was in was actually inside a box, and that that box had just been stolen from a high-security facility by a sultry assassin and was now stuffed inside her top as she flew high above the city. All he knew was that, despite the odd things happening all around him, he was still unbelievably bored. Odd things, yes. For a start, the bear population had exploded. They were everywhere now, and he’d had to start locking himself in their old rocket – which still sat in its place in the glade. He’d uprooted a large circle of moss and dragged it inside. It was a comfortable enough mattress, but the rocket was very small and he had to sleep with his legs in the air. Odd things. People had started to appear and disappear: startled children, whole families. The day before an entire army had wandered through, lost, bewildered. That morning he’d come across a door. No walls, just a door. When he’d opened the door he’d found himself standing in a wide room with stone walls and another pair of large doors at the far end. An extremely well-dressed man sat in a leather armchair and nursed a glass of brandy. He looked depressed. Opposite the man, silhouetted by the light streaming in from the entrance way, was a small figure on a wooden chair. She appeared to be sleeping.

  ‘What on earth are you doing in here?’ said the Well Dressed Man.

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied the captain.

  ‘Well, hadn’t you better leave?’

  And he had. He’d gone back through the door and found himself once more standing in a glade of red moss. When he turned round, the door had vanished. ‘Why didn’t I leave through those other doors?’ thought the captain, as he contemplated yet another night in paradise.

  Just an hour before he’d seen a figure he could swear was the Emperor himself wandering among the trees, as if in a dream. He’d called out, but the figure had kept walking.

  The captain lifted his bear’s-head hat and mopped the sweat from his brow with a grubby sleeve. The other thing that was happening was that it was getting much, much warmer.

  THE RACE FOR SPACE

  What a place we find ourselves in now. What a mad and dangerous universe of possibility.

  The Black Widow had stolen a set of rocket wings from a papal guardsman and was now flying over the city towards the royal launch bays where she hoped to find her former friend M. Francisco Fabrigas and give him the box containing a universe containing a world containing the captain of a ship from the next universe – all before the poison she had inhaled killed her. Meanwhile, that former friend had met his younger self and the two were currently arguing over who would get to fly the ship they’d stolen for a mission into space to rescue a small girl from the clutches of the Pope of the universe.

  The Well Dressed Man had finally regained consciousness and crawled out from the rubble the Cyclops! had nudged upon him. He stood slowly and looked with disgust upon
the state of his suit. It was covered in dust and the shoulder of his jacket was torn at the seam. Something would have to be done about this. All around him was dust and fire and patches of melting snow. The papal troops were regrouping. The towers were in flames. A web of silky rocket trails led down from the black ships above.

  The Well Dressed Man was still trying to take back the situation with his powerful mind, but failing. He was exhausted from his efforts to subdue the mind of a small girl. The girl. He had almost forgotten about her. Never mind, she was safe in a holding cell inside the mountain. He let his mind run up the mountainside, felt his way back through the tunnels to where his small prisoner was … gone. The Well Dressed Man felt his heart flutter. He almost cried out. No one knew she was there. No one except … ‘Dear Gods: the Pope!’ It had to be the Pope. The Well Dressed Man strode towards the cable car. All the way up the mountain he stood perfectly still. At the top he left the cable car, walked past the discarded Cyclops! and into the cave complex. He emerged a minute later, stood by the fountain at the entrance, one finger on his lips, coldly surveying the continuing carnage in the city below. He saw a figure near the edge. The figure had a large lensed instrument on a tripod and he was using it to slowly scan the city below.

  The Well Dressed Man called out, ‘Good day, Dr Dray!’ The figure turned, paused and bowed neatly. The Well Dressed Man smiled. ‘Recording events for posterity?’ Dray nodded politely. The Well Dressed Man made a faint gesture to a passing fighter craft. The ship swung round and came to land beside him. The pilot got out, walked to the fountain, and jumped in.

  SPACE ATTACK

  ‘Let the trial begin!’ said the Pope. There was not a person in the room, the Pope included, who thought a trial was necessary. Everyone knew what the outcome would be. The girl in the dock would be found guilty of conspiring against the Church and the Queen, and being a Devil-child. She would be taken to a place of execution (it was almost always a black hole), and thrown in. The Pope had a machine capable of creating a smallish – but very powerful – black hole, if one was not available. He loved using his Glory Hole machine even more than he loved using his space-clearing Ring device.