As soon as the strange angel spoke, the noise in their heads stopped. He had seen the sheep and goats. He said, ‘Someone here has been using the intelligence that God didn’t give them.’ He spoke in the Parisian of Aurora’s peers, as if knowing to whom he should attribute this ‘intelligence’. He looked at Aurora and then said, ‘I need a selection of the newly sharpened knives – fruit knives with thin blades, the heavy knives used to joint fowl, a cleaver. I need fresh linen, bandages, needles, silk thread.’ When she didn’t move he said, ‘Are you thinking of asking a question?’
Aurora got up and went to do as she was told.
The archangel – Sobran knew who it was – turned back to the bed and stripped the sheet from Xas, so that it flew out and settled neatly over four stuporous sheep. Lucifer rolled Xas on to his side to inspect the wound. Sobran stole a look at the face, saw calculation, squeezed his eyes shut, waited a moment, then looked again. Xas was face down, his wings spread so they arched off either side of the bed. Lucifer had walked to the double doors, there leaned to shake salt – Sobran supposed – out of his hair. He said something in the language Xas had once used to speak endearingly to Sobran’s dog, Josie, a language of supple, complex syllabics. He spoke quietly but with great passion. There was a multiple tiny ticking and every parched leaf on the tree tops by the double doors detached itself and fell in unison. Lucifer stopped speaking, was completely still for a moment, then stepped back, closed the doors, shot the bolt and came back into the room, the floor quivering under his tread. Sobran saw the candles and lamps ignite as the archangel approached the bed, and fire erupt in the cold coals of the fireplace.
Sobran felt that he was experiencing each instant twice – like the touch of a snowflake, first a dry, soft contact, then as the flake melts against skin a second strike of cold.
Lucifer came right up to Sobran and crouched, bent his head, face still well above Sobran’s. He was very tall, nearly eight foot, but not attenuated and big-hipped as giants usually are. He was immense and perfect. His wings spread out around him on the floor, perfumed and opulent. Sobran saw the long scars on the archangel’s chest, under ropes of pearl in every shade from white to blue-black. Lucifer took Sobran’s face between his hands and compelled the man to meet his eyes.
He said, ‘I will cut off his wings and you can keep him. He’ll always have to wear a shirt – but you can keep him.’ He spoke in the dialect of the Chalonnais, his diction as crude as Sobran’s grandfather the boatman’s had been. He released Sobran and got up.
The man found that, although he could think, he couldn’t pray. He heard the door, then saw Aurora come in with a sewing kit and knives bundled in cloth like a babe-in-arms. She went straight to the archangel and put both parcel and kit into his hands. He placed them on the foot of the bed, reached back to lift the ropes of pearl over his head, looked about for somewhere to put them – and strung them over the drooping head of the last conscious sheep.
Lucifer set to work, turned one of Xas’s wings this way and that, studying its physiology, exploring the downy hollow where the wing joined a saddle of wing muscle across the angel’s spine. He felt with his fingers and considered. He took a knife in hand, shrugged back the plait that slithered across his shoulder, then flattened the arching joints of his own top wings down so that they didn’t obscure the light.
‘No!’ Sobran said. He wasn’t able to find his feet so shambled across the room ape-fashion on feet and knuckles. He seized the wrist of the hand that held the knife (one of the fine fruit knives, Aurora saw, a knife with a short curved blade).
‘Any display of defiance of authority will find favour with me,’ the archangel said, ‘but you haven’t picked a good moment.’
Sobran squeezed his eyes shut, averted his face, but held on.
‘I’m sure you won’t love him any less,’ the archangel went on in a sweet blithe tone, ‘if there’s a little less of him.’ Then he said, in a voice that had hooks, ‘I want you to help me, Jodeau. Help me hold his wing.’
Sobran didn’t respond.
Lucifer flicked him off, abrupt, brutal, and Aurora saw for an instant what she thought were real feelings – a species of envy or unhappiness no more profound than human envy or unhappiness, but sharper, concentrated.
The archangel made a cut, slid the knife in under skin, leaving skin spare to seal a great wound where wing joined the body.
Aurora and Sobran crouched, near each other, but not touching. Sobran wept, his arms wrapped around his head. Aurora watched. She saw cuts through flesh so bloodless it only oozed; she saw the knives changed, but not change hands; a joint boned, blood paint the surgeon’s beautiful arms. Lucifer straightened, raised a wing, one end ragged meat, and pressed his face into its feathers, stood holding it against his side, where it looked like a slight woman limply inclined against a strong man. Then he dropped it and followed it with his eyes to see it too had draped the one upright and several prone sheep. He stiffened, then stooped, pulled the wing aside and began to gather goats and sheep, the back legs of several in each hand. He held his arms out from his sides and the animals dangled in bunches, one sheep kicking faintly. The archangel went to the double doors, unbolted them and tossed the dead animals out. He wiped his hands on his own cheeks. He was speaking again, low, maddened, indecipherable.
When he came back he began, with a steady hand, on the second wing. Aurora could now see white in his eyes, which had seemed all iris. As he finished with the small knife, and went to put it down, he seemed to think again, and instead thrust it into the rounded muscle of his own shoulder, as though it was handier there. Blood, red and faintly luminescent, trickled down his arm.
He freed Xas’s other wing, dropped it, surveyed his work, and began to trim the surplus of downy skin so that it could be closed in two neat seams over each wound. From the sewing kit he selected a needle and yellow silk thread, broke the thread across his teeth, as a seamstress might, and threaded a needle. He began to match cut muscle to muscle and reattach them, pinching slippery elastic ends of tendons together, then stitching.
‘More candles,’ he said after a time. ‘Even I can’t work well in this light.’
Aurora went to find more candles. She was weak and unsteady, her clothes as wet with sweat as had been that cloth with which the surgeon had covered her own face. It was raining beyond the coach house door; there was moisture dark on the flagstone floor and the ground sparkled. She found some candles in the coach house and didn’t need to go out.
Lucifer had three needles in his arm alongside the knife, none sharp enough now. He let Aurora light the candles, looked into her eyes as if searching her thoughts, as if he had to look to know – just like everyone else. His eyes were black, very wide spaced, as patient as the eyes of an ox, and as cold as the river.
He made his first seam along the line of the excision. Then, as he saw what shape it took, he laughed once and bitterly – for each excised wing left a scar that curved six inches below and parallel to the top of Xas’s shoulder, then straight down beside his spine, then curved again shallowly, under his shoulder blade towards his side. A capital J on the one side and, on the other, a mirror image of a capital J.
The last thread cut, knife and needles pulled from his shoulder, Lucifer gathered Xas in his arms and lay down with him, his bloody arms crossed behind Xas’s head and wings encasing them both so that together they were a great chrysalis.
Hours passed. Aurora fell asleep.
Lucifer got up after dawn, opened the other leaf of the double doors, and came back to look at Xas in the morning light. He bent his fair, blood-mottled face down to Xas’s and kissed him once, beside his mouth, as though deflected at the last moment by some prohibition. He went to the windows, thought of flight, but looked down and jumped instead.
Aurora went to see what he was doing, found him relieving the dead sheep of his strings of pearls. Apparently an archangel could be as forgetful as any human in the thick of things. He looked up at her, i
n the daylight as colourful as the dusky, jewelled tropical moths in her husband’s butterfly collection. Selecting one strand of pearls he tossed them up to her. She caught them – and he smiled at her, sad and charming and reprehensible, then took off. The wind his wings made knocked her over.
1836 Cep (vine stock)
‘This time he breaks his promise,’ Sobran said.
It was dawn and the distances were back with a vengeance, no heat pulling the air into transparent gathers. It was clear to all points of the compass; the east an open furnace, the west blue air.
Aurora nestled under Sobran’s arm, held one of his hands with both hers, his little finger closed in one fist, thumb in the other.
‘He won’t come back. Once he breaks his promise there’ll be no promise.’
Aurora asked Sobran to recall how they had feared Xas would never move again. ‘He had the patience to stay backed into that corner for a century.’
They were quiet, remembering.
Xas had said he’d been ‘out of time’. When he came back into time – came to – he’d tried to fly, had lunged at the open windows as a trapped bird might, awkward, powerful, unbalanced. Then he caught himself – came into knowledge as some come into money and it wrecks their lives. He’d backed into a corner, hiding his back – the sutures and downy skin – not his uncovered genitals.
Half a week after Xas woke, the sheep and goats were bloated and stinking. Xas still hadn’t moved, spoken or let Sobran near him. Aurora put on a headscarf and went to ask the angel to help her bury the dead animals. ‘I don’t want to call on Antoine or Baptiste,’ she had said. ‘Or involve my servants. After all, you’re responsible for the deaths of these creatures. You know that, don’t you? I am not merely in an awkward position – my servants will think Sobran and I mad, or monstrous, if they see these corpses. If they haven’t already seen them.’ She said, ‘Help me now then go back to whatever it is you’re doing.’
The angel looked at her. ‘I’m not doing anything.’
‘Are you in pain?’
‘Yes. It’s strange. The pain – strange to me.’
Aurora didn’t know what to expect from him so wasn’t inhibited by her expectations. She just kept on asking for what she wanted. ‘Sobran can’t help me. He’s ill – as am I.’ She pulled the scarf from her hair and watched the strands settle gently on and around the angel’s feet. Her hair had come out in horsetails in her comb. To Aurora, Xas seemed whole. She looked at his feet, hands, hair – could see nothing missing. The wings were wrapped and hidden under the bed. She and Sobran had done that before Xas woke.
‘I’ve been out of time,’ the angel said. ‘Tell me what happened.’
Aurora had him put on one of Sobran’s nightshirts – and clogs, so he could stand on the edge of the spade. When it was full dark they went out. She watched him learn to walk. He learned very quickly, like a foal, as though winglessness was a contingency for which his nature had provided. He was clumsy to the foot of the stairs. Then awkward. And by the time they’d fetched spades and had begun to dig beside the piled animals, Aurora saw how deft he’d become – still an angel in every competent particle of his maimed body. But she could see it took all the angel’s self-discipline not to turn and turn, looking for causes, the slight, horrible pressure of the cloth against his back. In the end she had to stop digging and just watch him work. She sat by the side of the pit and told him what had happened – what she thought had happened.
Xas didn’t sweat, didn’t tire, never used his weight, never stood on the edge of the spade. He didn’t look at her but once said, in warning, ‘Opinion,’ when she offered her interpretation of one of Lucifer’s actions before describing the action. He didn’t want interpretations, only evidence.
She thought he had been in despair. Then she thought him cold and methodical.
When the corpses were in the pit he paused, looked down at them. ‘Where are the wings?’ he asked. ‘Perhaps I should bury the wings.’ He was ghostly in the grubby nightshirt and she couldn’t see his face.
She corrected him. ‘Your wings.’
‘My wings.’
Aurora looked at the jumble of bodies, bloated, mottled bellies from which the hair was beginning to moult – balding like worn velvet – a dozen stiff legs, a pouting vulva. ‘You can’t put them in there,’ she said.
Xas was quiet, then made a sudden impatient movement of legs and shoulders, a gesture that didn’t make sense without wings. ‘Are they relics or rubbish?’
‘My breast wasn’t rubbish.’
‘Did you keep your breast?’
Aurora began to cry. She pressed her hands to her face and swayed above the stink.
The angel came around the pit. He apologised.
Aurora said, ‘I want you at least to speak to Sobran when he recovers. I have to help him.’
‘Sobran wants to touch me. I don’t want to be touched.’
‘He wants to comfort you.’
Xas didn’t say anything further, but began to fill in the pit. Aurora dried her tears.
When Xas had finished she took him to the pump, cranked the handle for him while he stripped off and washed.
‘Those sutures need removing, will you at least let me do that much?’
They went upstairs. He sat hugging his knees, a branch of candles behind him. She knelt and snipped, then pulled each cut stitch free. ‘They’re completely regular, these stitches, the same distance apart and same size.’
‘Complete symmetry is an insult to God. Lucifer does everything as perfectly as he can.’
‘What he did to you was an insult to God.’
‘God let him. Or colluded. I don’t care to know. I’m putting them both behind me.’
Her hands were shaking. There was one stitch left. The scissors caught his skin but couldn’t cut it. Or she couldn’t. ‘I’ve finished,’ she told him.
He sighed and unfolded. For a moment she imagined he’d lie back in her lap, but he got up and went to the wall of the room, further from the window, put his back to it and sat down.
‘You’ll need clothes,’ she said, ‘and shoes.’
‘Do you remember his first shoes?’ Aurora asked Sobran.
What Sobran remembered was that Xas apparently had been
afraid of space. He tolerated daylight, but didn’t like to be out in it. It gave him no satisfaction to shade his eyes and measure distances. He stayed indoors, still by the wall, wouldn’t look at Sobran’s face, but at his feet if the man came within two metres. It was as though he’d drawn a line and let the man know by a look that his feet had breached its bounds.
‘I have no prospects,’ he said to Sobran and Aurora. He showed them what he meant by making blinkers with his hands to hide the view through the open windows.
He wasn’t afraid of space, but of distance. Everywhere was too far. He couldn’t tire – but why cross the room, descend the stairs, cross the courtyard, why walk out under the trees? Covering the ground seemed foreign and futile. He was above all that.
‘I know you feel vulnerable and unsightly,’ Sobran said, on just one occasion when he tried to coax the angel back to life. ‘But you can’t spend your life with your back to the wall.’
‘I could find another wall,’ Xas said, angry – which was good.
‘Here are your shoes,’ Sobran said, and pushed the pair forward with one of his feet. ‘They are made to a tracing, but are very fine. The best. Aurora has a shirt, breeches, a jacket and stock. Come out and look at the vines. The workers are burning the prunings now.’
‘Come out at night and look at the river,’ Aurora said. ‘You could swim. You would be weightless in the water.’
‘She has more imagination than you,’ Xas said to Sobran, not looking at him.
‘Here are your shoes, Xas, your first shoes.’
The angel hated not to feel cocooned. At first he’d sit with his arms wrapped around himself, but later took to winding himself in a blanket. Autumn turned to win
ter, but he wasn’t cold. Sobran spent his Sundays at Clos Jodeau – then Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays too, till work called him back to Vully. The first time he saw Xas he had mistaken the angel for a statue; now Xas had turned himself into a statue, who did not need to eat or drink or eliminate waste, and was indifferent to time passing.
Aurora visited him every day.
Some days she noticed that his clothes seemed to have been immersed and then to have dried on his body. Then, on a Sunday night, Aurora went to the soldiers’ gallery and found the doors hooked back and snow blowing in. She wrapped herself in the angel’s abandoned blanket – wool freshened, it seemed, by contact with his body. She waited by the window. When a couple of hours had passed she saw him come around the side of the coach house in his shirts, trousers and shoes. She moved back against the wall but he saw her as soon as he looked up, his gaze penetrating the shadow where she hid. They looked at each other. His hair blew around his face like black smoke mixed with the white vapour of his breath – breath, warm like that of any other mammal. He crouched and sprang up twenty feet, caught the doorsill by his hands and came inside.
Aurora stood and surrendered his blanket. She could see that his clothes were wet through, but he didn’t shed them, just wrapped himself, not for the warmth but the sensation of constriction.
‘Sobran thinks you never move,’ Aurora accused.
‘I don’t care what he thinks.’
Aurora knelt near him. He was like a wild animal, his sulking, his leap, and his resentful wariness. ‘I know that you must feel unclean now, and not want him to touch you. I know that you and he were lovers – though Sobran and I haven’t spoken about it. Have you noticed that he’s never here now?’
The Vintners Luck Page 20