He heard Alice speak:
‘Take courage, Guy. Be calm. There has been an accident.’
Dominic: ‘A little accident. It’s all right.’
He would stretch his aching hands. He looked down. Two bulky bandages rested on his knees. One of them was bloodstained. He screamed.
‘You must hold him, Georges! He is mad with it.’ French. But he understood. ‘Dominic, stop!’
‘No. No. Give him the medicine.’
‘Stupid! He had a full dose.’
‘Give it!’
A foul taste filled his mouth. He tried to spit it out. He choked and swallowed.
He floated, safe in his comfortable seat. He knew that Alice was there. She touched his cheek. He floated and looked out of the window. A lovely green landscape was rushing past. Little fields. Planted. Vines: wine. A taste of wine would be a very good thing. Especially now.
‘Can I hold your hand, Alice?’ he said.
‘Not now, Guy. Not just now. Look out of the window. We shall soon be there.’
‘There?’
‘Lyon.’
Dominic drove fast. It was all right. He could drive. It was OK. Dominic was driving. Dominic was speaking.
‘We’d better try Mother’s remedy on him. A light application of blood.’
‘Shh! Shut up, you fool!’
‘He’s asleep.’
‘He isn’t.’
Not his problem. Others. He could kill Koschei. His fault. He should kill him. It was an impossible task to set yourself. He remembered how his hands had flown away like white birds in a dusty dawn. He remembered some of it. The sawdust. The barn. Hands. The wood. Sunlight. Hands in the night. Hands on Alice. Never again.
I could push him off a rock.
‘What’s that?’ he said. The land was steeper, away from the road, rock piling itself upon rock in petrified imitation of the greens and browns of the vineyards below it.
‘La Roche de Solutré,’ said Georges. ‘Préhistorique.’
Natural battlements; ancient stone: a sheer and perilous stronghold. Bushes and stunted trees clung to precipitous rockfaces.
‘That’s the Rock of Solutré,’ said Alice. ‘It’s a Stone Age site – they used to drive horses off it to kill them. Oh, sorry.’
‘My ancestors!’ Georges laughed.
‘Nearly five hundred metres high,’ said Dominic. ‘I have climbed there.’
‘That’s high.’ He was managing to speak, through the fog; conversing. ‘High. Weren’t you afraid of falling?’
The cliff upon which Pargur stands is of such height, it is a nonpareil. No human mind, unless housed in a brain as superior to man’s as his is to an ant’s, could have conceived such a marvel. I stood upon its narrow brink and felt spray from the void hit my face. The land fell away so violently and so far that seabirds disappeared into the vapours below and rainbows sprung, curved, recurved and plunged back to extinguish their refracted light in the mists. I watched the gulls becoming luminescent shape-shifters, now red, now yellow, now a drifting combination of blue, indigo and violet.
The situation and the view were stupendous. I was wet, despite the waterproof I had bought that afternoon. I stood on the slippery ledge and thought of another height, the rocky bluff I had glimpsed upon the Archmage’s map. The place existed; it was no trick of mind or fancy. I had found and visited the library in Pargur’s Midday Plaza and in its fiction collection discovered and examined a map of northern Malthassa. Although it was overprinted many times with those two spell-binding words, ‘terra incognita’, I found ‘the Plains and – at their heart – the valley of SanZu. A series of angular lines were marked in silverpoint, “High ground”.’
I likened the peril in which Nemione had placed herself to the uncertain state of someone without a head for heights forced to stand on this ledge where I, with my strong head, was giddy. Or caught in the proverbial cleft stick, between two stools, the hard ground and a rocky place &c. The Archmage had tutored her and given her title, money and position; now he asked for his reward, nothing less than Nemione’s body and, with it, her heart and soul. She would not give those up. I was not then ready to contemplate another scenario, one in which Valdine was dead and I, occupying his place, was confronted with her adamantine obduracy. I believed I could win her; worse, because of our nearness in childhood and our common novitiate in the Cloister, I believed that she was already half mine.
Besides I had my memories of her stored away for reference in my little Memory Palace, and many more to add to them. When I was – what? More powerful? A prince? If ever I could, I should move the Memory Palace to Pargur. This city and no other must become my home. I recognized it and it knew me; it was the place to which I wished always to return, however and wherever I travelled.
A watery sun shone on my face. It had sufficient heat to disperse the vapours for a second or two and I glimpsed a turquoise ocean at ultimate distance between the projecting toes of my boots. Convinced that there was a way, be it long and hard, to all my desires, I turned to leave the precipice. Another marveller had joined me on the narrow path, a thin midnight candle of a scholar clad in blue velvet hood and gown. He blinked at me from eyes half-blinded by study, orbs as pink-rimmed as a ferret’s.
‘You must be aware that we have no sea-going ships,’ he said.
‘I am,’ I said, and wondered if he wanted to debate the nullity. ‘There are small boats in Malthassa, barges, rafts and the like, but no ships capable of venturing on that deep. Yet every one of our country’s male citizens is familiar with tall ships – grain-clippers, barques, schooners, barquentines – and with the special words which belong to them. Why do we not build one and go to sea?’
‘It is a paradox. They must exist elsewhere. They are in our books: I tell you this only to explain the precipice. Pargur is built upon the edge of the land and you may picture what you have been vouchsafed a glimpse of moments ago, the vasty deep, the rolling main, the mighty and boundless ocean entirely without ships. The upper layers of this cliff are composed not of stone strata as elsewhere, but of the city’s occupation layers, every one in use, not lost to all but archaeologists (though the number of archaeologists who have attempted to determine the date of Pargur’s first foundation is legion) but functioning as units of the Mutable City.’
‘This is why it is so hard for a newcomer to find his way about?’
‘Quite so. And why we fly above the confusion in our balloons. Yet you have got out of Castle Sehol unaided and found your way here. I see you have bought a waterproof from Comyn. Wise, eminently wise. He is the best in town; far better than his father or his son.’
‘Synchronal family members?’
‘In synchronal Pargurs.’
‘Why is there only one Lady Nemione?’
‘Obvious, my dear sir. Because there is only one Manderel Valdine – and one Koschei Corbillion. Come, Master Corbillion, let me lead you to the Archmage before my grandson or my grandfather appear and steal my job – it is hard to avoid one’s family or one’s obligations to them, though the concurrent existence of so many makes the city strong. Indeed it has always had the reputation of an unslightable stronghold, such fame that no force dares try the boast. Long may it continue to occupy the principal place in the military, merchant and occult life of our country.’
‘… merchant and occult life of our country,’ said Georges. ‘It has a long enough history, a terrible history. You are not the first, monsieur, to be brought here in unhappy circumstances. What a city is Lyon!’
Guy smiled lazily. He watched the traffic passing by. He was relaxed, remote from all effort and sensation. Not long ago, his discomfort had been acute and Dominic had stopped the car. Then Georges had assisted him from it and, by the roadside, helped him piss as if he were an invalid or some mad old king with his retainer.
When he was settled in the car again, Alice put a comforter between his lips; he was her baby. He had no cares. He sucked and drew the sweet smoke into hi
s lungs. Past Alice, beyond the window, trees and suburbs crowded against a high wall. The road ran steeply down, as if it needed to hide. It became the bottom of a trench and then they rushed into a tunnel and lights blazed about them.
This stuff about his hands. It was all a nonsense, it was inexplicable. He was too far away to understand.
‘Lyon is very old,’ Georges was saying. ‘First the Romans, then the Franks and after them the Holy Roman Emperor. Rabelais, puppets, silk, the Resistance – how are you feeling?’
‘Not myself.’
‘Ah, very good!’ He laughed, as if Guy had made a joke. ‘Never mind: we will soon have you safe.’
When the car stopped again, he would die. He must have lost a gallon of blood. He could remember it spattered on the sawdust; the barn had looked like a butcher’s shop. He could remember Helen’s excitement at the sight. She had touched one of the bloodstains with the tip of her forefinger, put the bloodied finger in her mouth and sucked, as he was sucking now, on the cool joint. That was before they had treated him. They must be driving him to a hospital. Why hadn’t they called an ambulance?
The blood-coloured car was good enough. Fast.
Where was Helen? Never mind; no problem. Alice sat beside him.
‘Kiss me,’ he said. ‘Please kiss me, Alice.’ The girl turned awkwardly to him and gave him a cold kiss on the cheek.
They were out of the tunnel. There was a river. Red roofs. Hills. Churches high. He had been here independently. He knew where he was: was that the Saône or Rhône? Where was Vieux Lyon, the old quarter? He did not know this area where new glass buildings were slotted in between old houses. The car began to climb. Narrow streets. Shabby facades. The car stopped outside a high building.
‘We have arrived,’ Alice said. ‘We are here!’
‘The hospital?’ He looked at her in desperation and caught agony in her eyes.
‘Why, yes,’ she said.
Georges helped him from the car. He turned again to Alice, but she avoided him, walked round the car and opened up the back. She took out his jacket and a plastic bag and gave them to Georges. Then, without a word, without a second look, she slammed the door down; got into the front seat beside Dominic. The engine purred. He watched his car slide away, his last sight of it a flash of red at the corner of the street. The lighter flash in the driver’s seat was the blond head of his son. His legs were weak. He stumbled against Georges.
‘Courage, my friend!’ the man said, supporting him. ‘It is not far.’ He leaned heavily on Georges and the butcher led him along an alleyway, down one flight of stairs and up another. They entered a dark doorway. A dirty blanket lay on the floor and Georges kicked it aside. The passageway was short and more stairs lay ahead, turning in an empty hallway, high, stone, steep. The walls were dank and the paint upon them had faded to a memory. The damp air smelled of urine, guilt and decay. They climbed.
Doors on the left were closed and dark. They passed one which was blocked by heavy timber cross-pieces. They mounted higher. One door remained, heavy and scarred, with six panels lined with dust. If it had been possible, Guy would have put out a hand and marked the dust with his fingerprints. Georges knocked.
It was still; as quiet as a court of law in the afternoon. He listened to his panting body. From the other side of the door came the faint sound of footsteps and keys. The door opened a crack. Georges spoke into it.
‘Bonjour Lèni. Il est la.’
No one answered but the door was opened a little wider, enough to admit them, and a small hand clutched at his sleeve.
PART TWO
EXCURSIONS IN PURGATORY
Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation – Oh why did I awake?
A. E. HOUSMAN
‘Monsieur! Here you are at last.’ She spoke in French, a small, middle-aged woman with tiny hands like a child’s and a firm and exact mouth. She held his sleeve and guided him. In her other hand she held a lighted candle in a spiral-shaped candlestick. Beyond her he could see the dim shapes of large pieces of furniture.
‘Where is he to go?’ said Georges, whispering as if he had entered a theatre after curtain-up.
‘In the salon, beast! You have the intelligence of a herd of dead pigs.’
The shutters were closed and the light of the candle feeble. Nevertheless, he could see a table and side tables, numerous couches, a large cupboard or sideboard, and the bed. The woman put the candle down and she and Georges lifted him on to the bed. He lay on his back and looked up. The bed had its own painted ceiling on which damaged cupids were playing. Half of them were torn to pieces, as if by gunfire. He heard the woman dusting her hands, one against the other, and Georges gave a grunt.
‘There!’ he said. ‘It is done.’
Guy rested his bandaged arms on the coverlet. The pillow tickled his face. He sneezed and the woman flourished a handkerchief and wiped his nose.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘It is nothing. I have often done the same for the holy Father. Now does Monsieur wish for anything? Some water, a cognac perhaps? To ease himself?’
‘No. Thank you.’
She and Georges walked away from him. He could hear them talking softly on the far side of the room. Then they went out and left him, desolate as a sick child, locked in like a convict when he was innocent and they guilty. He heard the key turn in the lock with a sound like stones falling on a coffin lid. Presently, he rolled on his side and tried to make sense of the gloom.
Soon, the woman came back.
‘Now,’ she said. ‘I will help you. I will undress you and put you properly to bed. You can sleep.’ She came close and untied his shoes. She took them off and began to unfasten his jeans. ‘We will leave the vest.’ She fingered it. ‘This is a vest?’
‘Tee-shirt,’ he said. ‘You know.’
She pulled down his jeans, removed his underpants. Her hand, in passing, brushed against him. ‘At least,’ she said, ‘you have not lost that!’ She folded the jeans and laid them on a chair. ‘I will help with the bedclothes.’
He lay in the antique bed, still as a corpse. He listened, hearing her moving about the room. Then it was quieter. She had gone again; again he heard the cold click of the doorlock. He listened for cars, and people talking in the streets of Lyon, but no sound reached him from outside. He thought about running away but, when he sat up, was dizzy and weak. The door was locked anyway and the woman had the key. How would he take and turn a key?
Later, he awoke. Several more candles burned in the room. The woman was sitting beside him.
‘Good evening,’ she said. ‘I am Lèni and you are Guy, isn’t it so? I have some soup for you.’
He wanted to protest but he was still weak, and he was hungry. Lèni helped him sit up and, perching close beside him on the bed, fed him potato soup with a large spoon. When he had finished she said, ‘Now you need the pot.’ He shook his head, but she threw the bedclothes aside and held an earthenware jug to his limp penis. ‘Let it go!’ He turned his head aside in embarrassment.
‘It is nothing,’ Lèni said. ‘I have often done the same for the reverend Father. Do you need to make the other?’
‘No!’
‘Now take your medicine.’ She held a small glass to his lips and tilted it. The liquid was not bitter like the stuff they had forced down him in the car: it tasted of wine. ‘You must take it or you won’t sleep!’ He swallowed it.
When she had settled him, she blew out all the candles but one and left him alone. He stared at it. It was the one she had carried when she met them at the door, a long candle of yellow wax in the holder called a cellar rat. A tail of metal could be wound up a metal spiral, lifting the candle as it burned down. He concentrated on it, operating the primitive mechanism in his mind. The burning candle smelled of animal fat. He watched the blue heart of the flame until it grew as large as he was and expanded about him as he lost consciousness. He slept.
He slept for days, waking in blurred candlelight: som
etimes myriad flames danced before him, sometimes one flame burned alone; once a ray of daylight found a way into the shuttered room. His taste buds revived to successive flavours: meat, potatoes, carrots, fish: all liquid; slept again. He tasted water and the spiritous medicine. He slept and woke, called for the jug or else was helped to balance on the cold and narrow rim of a chamber pot. Lèni bathed his face and washed his body. She sang to him, Fais ton dodo, mon p’tit frère, ‘Go to bye-byes, little brother.’ He did not dream and, waking suddenly after sleep as dark and dead as a closed vault, was terrified. He thought he had lost his imagination, all his story-telling abilities. He used to write, didn’t he? Waking one day with wet cheeks, he turned to Lèni and said, ‘I have written many books.’ ‘You can talk to me instead,’ she replied. ‘I, too, used to write. In my diary; but – it is lost and I continue without it.’ Sometimes he opened his eyes and saw Georges watching him from the doorway. Sometimes he saw Lèni sleeping on the sofa across the room, covered only by a ragged piece of cloth, still wearing her rusty black dress.
‘I am in mourning,’ she said once.
‘I make my penance,’ she said another time.
The dressings on his arms were smaller. He began to dream, at first of the cathedral where he had sung in the choir and alone at Christmas, standing before the altar in a blaze of candlelight, not Guy Parados but Chris Young, a small, blond boy with the voice of an angel. The great church was full of gloomy spaces, greys and browns relieved by glorious windows made of light. In his dreams he performed exacting tasks: dismantling a watch and piecing it back together, every minute wheel and cog, each separate jewel; painting a doll’s house with a fine sable hair brush. He carved an intricate and perfect castle out of an ice cube; then took it up, held it in a candle flame and watched it melt. His fingers burned. Each tendon ached and hot wires pierced his wrists. He spent longer periods awake, staring at the ceiling of the bed. The severed limbs of the damaged amoretti circled above him and the complete ones smiled, touching each other’s wings with chubby pink fingers. His groin itched and he rubbed himself against the sheets. He thought of horses rolling in summer meadows. He thought of chimpanzees and the higher apes, dextrous with fleas and sticks. He thought of his lost identity, his disappearance and his lack of fingerprints. All right, he would be a horse. When next he settled to sleep he ran out into a field of clean grass.
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