The Devil's Poetry

by Louise Cole

  In Canada House, a small group of people struggled to find peace.

  In between, there was me.

  Chapter 29

  The book burned under my fingers. It was ready. I was ready. And this time I knew where I was going.

  I stepped into the light space opening in front of me. I stepped into the light space in my mind and thought briefly of all the people I loved, that I would carry on loving as they lived out their fantastic, beautiful, painful lives. I thought of the extraordinary strength of the man who had guarded me and whose protection I had now stepped beyond.

  I stepped into the space, my space, and I began to speak. The words rippled with power, and I was unleashed upon the world. I poured myself out for them like wine. I was serene. I was exhilarated. I was seventeen years old, and I knew with calm certainty that this was the last thing I would ever do.

  “I speak of love and truth,

  of hearts and minds one with their intent.

  My words are the tattoo of the beating heart.”

  I ran lightly out of the big Edwardian house and through its gardens, jumping the brook and searching for the bottom of the stone staircase. I needed height to see my path. I thudded up the granite steps. I had only run for a minute or two before the searing heat made my skin slick with sweat.

  The pressure in my head was easing as though it finally had an opening, a doorway, and I felt the images flowing out in rapid, disordered succession. An eagle swooped low overhead, the sky turned to sea, burning with the rainbow colors of daybreak. I pushed them back, concentrated on my feet on the stairs. Balance, I reminded myself. It’s all about balance.

  At the top, I stopped and surveyed the world as it tumbled below me. The green moorland far below, the red desert beyond. On the horizon, roiling and bruised, storm clouds surged forward, casting huge shadows over the landscape, their darkness swallowing the edges of the world whole.

  I heard my voice carry out across the chasm at my feet, across the valley, and plunge on to meet the storm.

  “I read the elements and the ether,

  The nothing within the all.

  I read dust and water into living glory,

  Fire and air to flame-lit story . . .”

  I knew they could all hear it. Can they see it too? I wondered. Somewhere back there, my tiny connection with their technology should be streaming it all, everything I see, feel, everything in me. Share yourself, Ella said. It’s about trust.

  A leap of faith. So let’s show them.

  “Are you watching, Ella?” I asked aloud.

  I threw myself off the cliff.

  ***

  Cyrus whimpered, the pain in his head slicing, slicing, peeling off thin strips of him, until he could barely remember. He forced his legs to move, crawling through the edge of the journalists and soldiers, sidelong to the steps. The bodyguard had his back to him, warding off the press of bodies trying to climb the steps toward the girl. They were less aggressive now, the confusion of the words making them compliant, malleable, but still they stumbled forward, drawn by the music.

  He envied them. How he wished he had been a cow, a sheep, an unthinking innocent who hadn’t known how cruel and capricious the world could be. He would have been a slave, willingly. Yet the music had rejected and devoured him.

  It devoured him still, but he inched forward, each skewering note tightening his grip on the hilt of his blade.

  ***

  A child scratched in the red dirt of a desert road. Life boiled and erupted in black smokers leagues beneath the ocean; a drop of water sizzled, spitting, splitting. A flower burst forth into splendid hesitant death, withering into the insatiable maw of a collapsing star. A sun exploded and, through it all, my heartbeat. The world’s heartbeat.

  I could hear my voice, but others too spoke in my head. I wondered if the world could hear them, all the words I had ever read and loved: “. . . and only I discern infinite passion and the pain of finite hearts that yearn” . . . “to see the world in a grain of sand . . . eternity in an hour” . . .

  The images flowed through me so fast I could barely recognize them. Hands clasping, the slightest flex of fin against current. Children playing, laughing, a derelict building falling in seconds to the green reclamation of nature, “one world, wrapped so tight with miracles . . .” men praying, their feet bare and heads covered, a child screaming its way into the world, its bloodied mother smiling and reaching. “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, the proper study of mankind is man.”

  The words powered through me.

  The wind powered under me as I swept across the earth’s surface, headed straight for the storm. Tears whipped off my cheeks, but I didn’t know if it was the wind in my eyes, or sadness, or exhilaration that made me cry.

  The bodies of fallen soldiers lay under me, crumpled and half-buried in sand. The wind carried the keening of women and the dull boom of the shells. I heard the war chants and the jeers and the fury of the aggrieved. The gale became a hurricane, sand and debris and jagged lumps of metal whirling through the air. The purple-black clouds bubbled and spread like boiling ink.

  I flew on, into the storm, whipped by its winds and battered by its snatched weapons, and I didn’t flinch. I heard the poem and wrapped thoughts of Jace around me like a shield. I pulled the light behind me.

  “The intoxication of fruit, of wine, of love

  And the greatest love is death

  Which stalks all things, all ways,

  Seeking to know, to cherish and to end.

  The final and most potent love

  Is in death.”

  I understood that now, and it was all right. I would die for the people I loved. Not just my dad and Amber and Joe and Jace, but all of them. All those people going off to battle, all those mothers praying their children would come home. I could hear my tomb door banging over the wind, and I didn’t begrudge them it.

  I dropped to the earth. The sun was warm and soothing on my back. The black wall of night in front of me loomed cold and forbidding, just a few feet away.

  The noise in my head overwhelmed me. I struggled to hear my own voice over the cacophony. My legs wobbled and my feet slipped in the shifting sand. The images, good and bad, merged together, and I could hardly recognize anything anymore. Bombs, pollution, a gentle old hand patting another, a Chinese man reading aloud, they came too fast, their relentless pressure hammering on my mind like a flock of birds flying into glass. The other voices twined around my words like bindweed, chorusing, echoing, harmonising, strangling.

  The tears on my cheeks tasted more metallic than salt as they ran freely over my lips and tongue. I was weakening fast and the real confrontation was yet to come.

  ***

  Foreign Secretary Mick Sanders found himself dreaming of music. It was a high, soft note, melancholy and beautiful. Like a clarinet or a flute. Like a girl’s voice floating down from a mountain. He tuned out the voices around him and listened harder, craving another taste, another moment of that sweetness. It filled him like hope.

  He closed his eyes and, for a moment, he soared like an eagle. It was so clear from here, all of it, the pain and the sweetness. The choices.

  Suddenly he had no taste for the circular conversations and the enclosed room, the pettiness and squabbling. He was surrounded by the most powerful men in the world, and not one of them aspired to true greatness.

  The conversation petered out. Can they hear it, too? he wondered.

  “Gentlemen, I propose a short break. We’ll reconvene in ten minutes.”

  He strode into the admin center. The staff was crowded around a bank of monitors.

  The images exploded in front of him, fast and furious and terrible. Beauty beyond comprehension and suffering beyond bearing. The music swelled and lilted. It sounded like waves and battle and wind and a girl’s voice heralding change. It made him think of the day his son was born, and everything, for one bright shining moment, had seemed miraculous and within his reach.
r />   “What is this?” he asked an assistant.

  She wiped tears from her cheeks. “It’s solace,” she whispered.

  Sanders knew what he must do. He crouched down beside her desk. “Listen carefully. You have ten minutes.”

  ***

  Cyrus found the wall and dragged himself up the steps, making each wave of pain his fuel. He would end it. It was within his grasp. The girl was oblivious, locked into another world. He glanced at the bodyguard, throwing a reporter off the steps, his eyes scanning the half circle in front of the Reader. His mistake. Cyrus lurched to his feet, his fingernails scrabbling against the brickwork.

  He drew his blade, stepped to the girl, and lunged.

  ***

  The sniper shifted position. His earplugs made the world silent. He could not even hear his own breath as he lay motionless on the floor. The girl stood across the road, about sixty feet from him, her back to the doors, but the crowd around her ebbed and flowed. His finger caressed the trigger.

  He watched as she stared straight ahead into nothing. She held a book in her hand. For a moment, he had a clear shot, clean through the forehead. He took it.

  ***

  I faced the storm. I closed my eyes and pulled on the poetry, pulled on my friends. I could feel them out there, like threads tugging from my clothing, a gentle, insistent pressure. I would not be scared. I would not.

  I was terrified. I opened my mouth to speak, and fire erupted in my side. I screamed as it scalded me, ate me, tearing at my flesh like huge jaws.

  The nothing-girl stepped forward and watched me curiously as I fell.

  Chapter 30

  Cyrus’s blade bit deep, and, for one second, the girl looked straight at him, eyes wide in shock and terror.

  I have killed a child, he thought, his fingers numb around the hilt. Burning splinters rained from the door and buried themselves in his cheek. A bullet, he realised. It would have killed her had she not slumped on my blade.

  “Is this what the Order made me?” he asked her. “Or is this just what I am?”

  Her blood bubbled out down the steel and ran over his fingers, hot and wet.

  Then the bear of a bodyguard roared and flung Cyrus aside. His blade sucked out of the Reader, spraying the pavement with red. His head struck stone. As he passed out, he saw the Reader fall.

  ***

  The sniper saw the girl drop and heard her bodyguard’s cry of rage. There was no time to take him out. Two of the soldiers below were already scanning the top windows of Cockspur Street. No matter. The two women, his principal targets, were both eliminated. He’d be paid.

  He lay on his side, his cheek against the cold marble floor, while his hands swiftly disassembled the rifle. Twenty seconds later, he raced down the back stairs and away.

  ***

  The music burned.

  Cyrus was back at the beginning where his life and death had both begun. Her forehead lay embedded in the broken windscreen, a thin stream of blood dripping, dripping. He wished he could recall her name.

  The translucent blue of his thigh muscle shone where the shard of metal pinned him.

  The day was stilled by his grief. No bird sang over its high sharp tones, no breeze competed with the scything music of his soul.

  He dreamed of the darkness made solid, slithering across the road toward him. Dragging form from the shadows, dragging blackness from every imperfect soul it passed, it coalesced into a wave, wider than a house, an endless void, dark as old blood. The music powered it, his own grief harmonized, sang back to it, summoned it forward.

  It reared above him and swallowed him whole.

  He tried to recall her face. Or his name. Anything but the scarlet stream. But there was nothing now. Nothing except the burning.

  ***

  Jace dragged Callie to sit against the doors. Blood soaked her shirt. He peeled it back to show the gash in her left side, the muscle blue and shiny. He tried to remember his field training: was there anything vital behind there? He didn’t think so, but his mind was fogged despite the head phones. His shield disintegrated. She was bleeding plenty but it wasn’t pumping and spraying, just a steady flow down into the denim of her jeans. Not an artery then.

  He shrugged off his jacket and pressed it tight against the wound. He would have to move her. Her lips moved constantly, but he couldn’t hear her. He glanced behind. The crowd was silent, still, their faces taut like children before a show. Freaks. He might become one of them. He ripped off the headphones and put his ear close to her mouth.

  “I have to take you. Now,” he said. What if he couldn’t get her back? If he stopped her now, would she be lost?

  She carried on muttering, her hands closed like a vice around the book and the microphone. He put his hand on hers. He couldn’t hear her well, but he thought she was mouthing “No. No. No.”

  Chapter 31

  No. No. I can’t fail now, I prayed with the small corner of my mind that I had left. Please don’t let me fail them now.

  The nothing-girl stepped out of the storm and gazed at me across the sand.

  “I have to take you,” she said. “Now.” Her voice was strange. Familiar.

  “No,” I whispered. “No. I won’t go with you. I won’t. I’m their shield.”

  She spread her arms. “Hold me.” She spoke in a child’s voice. A six-year-old’s voice. My voice.

  I pressed my hand to the fire within my side. My palm grew hot, and fire stuck to my fingers. “No.”

  “I am part of you. All this . . .” She gestured behind her. “It’s part of you.”

  The sand molded around my body. I couldn’t focus. My voice, thready and thin, floated across the emptiness.

  “The bright red sun

  Riven with the blood of the warrior

  And risen from the rack of childbirth

  Clouded by the ambitions of men

  And drowned forever in the ring of metal,

  The rear of horse and the wrath of arms.”

  I shook my head to clear my vision, but the darkness was pressing on both sides now. The sand felt like wet grass beneath my feet, and the tomb door slammed into the night. Behind me, my voice had stuttered into nothing, the poetry dying on my tongue.

  “Hold me,” she said again. “They left me alone in the dark. Everyone’s gone, and I’m scared.”

  Then a hand took mine, warm and strong. I couldn’t see him, but I knew that hand. I’d felt it. It cupped mine so softly, but I squeezed back hard. I could feel leather in my grip.

  I pulled myself onto my elbows and then my knees. Red sand clung to me.

  “Don’t use my voice,” I snarled. “I am more than that. This world is more than that.”

  “Are you sure? Your mummy left you, your daddy ignored you, and you are all alone. What kind of world is that?”

  Woodland eyes, my dad’s herbs, Amber clutching her laptop, Jace’s quirky smile . . . I got one foot under me.

  “My father loves me. He held my picture.” The image fell away. Jace’s hand was gone, and I was alone in the dark once more, with nothing but the sound of my own ragged breathing and my blood spilling into the wet grass. I could feel it pumping out with every jolt of my heart. I was dying. I’d failed. I curled up on the earth, just a small girl sobbing for her mother.

  The nothing-girl wasn’t done.

  “All the fighting, all the violence, it’s inevitable,” she continued. “All those demons locked in your heads, it’s no wonder you tear yourselves apart. It’s safer to fight than to admit weakness.” She flew forward suddenly, shadow billowing behind her like a cloak, rushing toward me.

  I wondered how I had ever thought I could avoid this. I was so stupid. What, one good cry and you can empty yourself of years of grief? Jace had been right. This battle was lost years ago.

  I was useless to the Order. To everyone.

  She put her hand on my head, stroked my hair back from my sodden face. “Tell me: did they say they loved you before they sent you to die?
”

  “Yes.” My father wanting me to run, Amber’s face by the lockers. “I didn’t need some Order to tell me my friend was special, OK?” I could hear her voice as though she was next to me.

  Jace murmuring that I was his shield before he leaped off the steps to defend me.

  “It’ll be soon now,” she said, stroking my hair. “You’ll die alone, but it won’t take long.”

  “No.” I tried to push her hand off me, but I had no strength. “I’m his shield. I will be everyone’s shield.”

  “Fool. You’re not a shield. You’re a sacrifice.”

  She pulled my face off the grass, her fist rooted in my hair, and forced my eyes open. Scenes from the cities rolled out toward us, horror and mayhem. Soldiers on the frontline, throwing their arms over their heads as mortars exploded. Women grieving.

  “They are just like you. Alone and terrified, senseless. None of them love you. None of them will ever know your name. Even your friends won’t mourn you for long. As for your bodyguard—how long will he spend grieving for a girl he knew less than a week?”

  She’s right, I thought. She had always been right. We never knew how much people loved us, if we would be missed, if our being here mattered. My breath shuddered in my chest. They were the questions and fears that had plagued me all my life.

  But another thought grew, one so small and so huge, I had almost missed it entirely.

  ***

  Jace grabbed the keys from a technician’s hand and threw open the back doors of the van. He flung equipment out of his way. They must have one, it was law. Surely it was law. Then he saw it tucked under a seat. A medi-kit, its red cross scored across the top like a smear of blood.

  He jumped over people, knocked them aside as he bounded back up the steps. There was no pressure bandage, just a thick roll of crepe. He fumbled with her clothes, but her back was to the wooden door. He tried turning her, but it was no good.

  “You’ll have to stand. Callie, you have to stand up.” He put his shoulder under her and heaved.