by K. J. Bishop
The White Ma’at says she doesn’t care about my dull thoughts. But if I had some thoughts that glimmered a little? Perhaps she wants payment or part-payment in that coin. She is getting fretful, it may be, like a bored child, sick of her boxed-in life, and wants to hear a wonder-tale. I would rather believe that than believe she has changed, or is changing.
But how to give wonder to a creature like her?
‘Well, White Ma’at,’ I begin at last, ‘as for why I want to save him, it’s like this…’
From the seed of the name I gave him there grows a tale of happiness and delight that was lost to the world even before the long-ago age when the Ma’ats ruled from their halls where Shindy Estate is now. The gist is that my Gleeful Horse will bring this happiness back to us.
Or the beginning of the tale grows, anyway, issuing from me like a run of notes from a whistle. I use my best words – words and devices of speech I have heard during my life and remembered for their decorative and noble effects but have never had occasion to use aloud.
My efforts sound very handsome to me – so handsome that they even sound truthful.
But before I am much past the beginning, the White Ma’at snaps ‘Enough!’ so sharply that I jump. In the glare of her cataracts, my story lies dead. If it had been a treasure animal it would have been not beaten with wooden weapons but dispatched in an instant with one swing of a real sword.
I want to cry out that this is not a game. It’s all I can do to bite my tongue. I can’t make myself not think of putting my huge hands around the neck of the White Ma’at and shutting her throat for her. Of course, if I tried something so mad, she might drum me into the ground like the biggest raisin of all. I feel sick, not for my sake but for the sake of my horse, whose winking eye shows how little he understands.
But the White Ma’at only twitches her lips, as if she were amused at last.
‘Let’s not tell the end of the story,’ she says, and her voice is calm. And she, then: ‘You must fill that sorry thing with treasures again, Molimus.’ I don’t like her calling him a sorry thing. But I hearken to what she tells me, now that she is speaking about the Gleeful Horse.
‘You don’t know at all why you want to save it. But I know on your behalf. The future will work through you, Molimus. Who would have imagined that? Replenish his treasures – you have your work, Molimus the Great. Replenish them abundantly.’
‘And how shall I do that?’ I ask gruffly. Her insults and sneering tone have rubbed me up the wrong way, and I can’t hide it – but I think she was telling the truth that she doesn’t care about my thoughts, even if they’re disrespectful. ‘Should I buy caramels and trinkets and feed them to him?’
‘No,’ she answers to my words. ‘The world inside him is yet another world. You can’t see it, Molimus. These things, these nothings that fall out of a treasure animal, are altogether different when they’re inside him. In the world inside him, they are more like stars. It is elements – starlike pieces – of this sort that you must gather and feed to him. He has one left, as you saw. One is not enough.’
I feel a qualm, as if conspiracy sits there with us. The Ma’at sounds more like herself again, but I am suddenly ill with a spasm that feels like shame. I can’t say whether this is the reasonable compunction that belongs properly to the healthy conscience of a man, or an imaginative, fanciful shame. Whatever it is, here in the Garth of the Aorist it has the shape of a real, solid thing stuck in my gullet, making me gag around it. My tongue feels it as it comes up with a mouthful of bile. It is annular, with an embellishment on one side: a sort of ornamented sphincter. I spit the plastic ring out onto the floor, where its stones of pure false red blink sleepily in the weak sun that has placed one foot through the opening in the wall.
The White Ma’at picks it up and makes it vanish between her fingers like a street magician doing a coin trick.
‘Was that a starlike piece?’ I ask.
She says no, it wasn’t, but it was something I should feel better for having got out of me.
And waits, until I ask where I should find them.
Within every living thing is a starlike piece. Those within human beings are bright, and those within children are the brightest of all. As people age, the starlike parts grow dim as though with distance, except in the cases of certain geniuses and halfwits. At first I didn’t understand how children can be so cruel and their starlike parts so bright, but the White Ma’at, who told me these things when she gave me the Wine of Smoke, said that she knew nothing of stars being kind, only of their being powerful.
She asked me three times if I really wished to drink the Wine of Smoke.
The Wine of Smoke was acquired by her, hundreds of years ago, from a man who combined the talents of wizard and vintner, who had come to the Garth of the Aorist to bargain with her. She intended to use it to escape from the confinement that Prince November had forced on her. But even after drinking a draft and becoming smoke, she found that she still could not penetrate past the cloister. The White Ma’at spent more than a century in sorcerous meditation of the most strenuous kind to turn her body back to flesh.
For someone who is not a sorcerer there is no such possibility of return. And the gift of death is lost. If one who had drunk the Wine of Smoke were captured and, for example, shut within a bottle and the bottle sent deep into the earth, he would be stuck in that bind until the end of time. This, said the White Ma’at, is the penalty I should expect to suffer if I ever break our agreement.
As if I would ever break it – for all is well with the Gleeful Horse. He greets me leaping and grinning when I return home in the early mornings. Even before I get back, I hear him whinny merrily when he smells me coming through the fog on the river.
I think he has forgotten that he was ever hurt. There’s no rancour or fear in him, nothing timorous or furtive. He breathes in the starry motes – they look like sun-kissed thistledown – through his fiddle-shaped nostrils. He capers all around the bridge and the docks, rolling his eyes and winking, brave as a flag, friend to cats and dogs, and that is as it should be. I only wish I could pet him; but in the afternoons I lead him by my scent to Shindy Park, and the old ladies who feed the ducks there make a great fuss of him.
The starlike pieces don’t last very long – this being because they aren’t his own, the White Ma’at taught me – so I must keep putting them inside him, as she told me to do. For each one that I give to him, I must take another to give to her.
Over in Firmitas they shut all their gilded and vermilion windows at night, and in Bracklow and Shindy they hang up charms next to fireplaces. On both sides of the river they talk in whispers about the smoke that sticks to the life of children and pulls it away. The ones the smoke touches sicken and die quickly. Before they die they change, becoming like wax-paper figures. You could light candles in them and they would be child-shaped lanterns. Because they become hollow, like treasure animals, the sick ones are euphemistically called Treasure Children.
Bracklow wonders where Molimus the Great has gone, but I’m still around, in the smoke of chimneys and bus exhausts, and in the engine smoke of the day boats ferrying the folk who work as maids and porters in Firmitas. I believe I know what the White Ma’at does with her share of the starlike pieces, for I’ve seen Prince November in his tin-shingled carriage out on the chalk hills more than once, with his retinue in dun and black, driving towards the birch wood. He and she have come to a new agreement, I think, whereby she is paying off her debts.
The vein on her forehead has become a lode of white gold: often swollen, but sometimes flat, so that the gossip about Prince November drinking from her has gained more currency amongst those who go to see her. But not so many do these days. Unthinkable as it is, she has changed. She is nearly always queer now. I never know whether she will be distracted or depressed or silly when I come with the lovely motes for her to inhale. She wears the ring I coughed up, and when she’s in her whimsical mood she steals admiring looks at it, as if it
were a real ruby band on her finger.
I would not have believed it possible, but since the emptying sickness has been in the world the old game of murdering treasure animals has fallen out of favour. Ball games and swap cards are popular now, and pageant games.
In the pageants, a character called Grinning Horse has for some time been a playground hero. He is the one who saves children by breathing in the smoke before it can reach them. He is also the one who, by the laws of the games, is the bold opponent of a certain Prince No-Never, and his old nurse, the Wheat Mate, and defeats them (as he defeats policemen, schoolmasters, and other vile enemies – often in rough and bloody ways, children being what they are).
For months, I could make no pretence to having an explanation for this, but eventually I began to hear things. It seems that the Treasure Children themselves started the invention of Grinning Horse, Prince No-Never and the Wheat Mate. If what I have heard is true, the Treasure Children dream of these characters after the smoke visits them, and they say the smoke gives them the dreams in exchange for their lives. The dreams, and the part played by the smoke, they confide about to friends and siblings before they are seized by the silence that comes with the hollowing effect of the illness, and the accounts are reinforced by others who fall sick.
I remember the White Ma’at’s words concerning the future, and how my never-finished tale of the Gleeful Horse sounded true when I tried to tell it.
So perhaps it will all be just as I imagined.
MOTHER’S CURTAINS
For Alex Dally MacFarlane
‘She doesn’t like us,’ complained Mother’s curtains.
‘She used to. We used to undulate above her bed while she thought of our carnations in a garden.’
‘What a garden that was! It went on forever.’
‘In fifty directions–’
‘Colossal–’
‘With long lawns and parterres and topiaries–’
‘And grottoes and bosquets and espaliered orchards, once she found out about such things–’
‘People in towering silver wigs, like walking castles.’
‘Buttonholes embroidered with carnations.’
The curtains sniffed, one side sniffing to the other, and the other side sniffing back. The sniffing went on through the grey plush afternoon and the brief nylon-yellow sunset and into the evening, when, as the street outside darkened and people started to come home in their cars, doubt set in. After all, they were only ordinary curtains in an ordinary house: they were not all that immensely sure of themselves.
Now drawn together, the two halves of the curtains began to discuss their identical uncertainties in whispers.
‘Are we really mundane?’
‘We are a lot like the curtains over the road.’
‘But we gave her lovely dreams.’
‘But not wild dreams.’
‘Well, never mind about her. She did all right in the end, after all. What about us?’
‘Us, dear? What do you mean?’
‘Well, have you ever had a wild dream?’
‘Have you?’
‘I asked first.’
‘Well…’ The half of the curtains that had been asked – it was the left side – gave a self-deprecating twitch. ‘As a matter of fact, I did use to dream about being a sail. On a pirate ship. Terribly silly of me. I mean, what sort of pirate would have carnation-patterned sails?’
The right side of the curtains then confessed to having had the same dream. It said: ‘But I thought that carnation sails might be just the thing to have on a pirate ship. On a pattern like ours, who would notice a few drops or even sprays of blood?’
In the morning, the curtains told Mother about their wish.
‘Oh, how convenient,’ said Mother. ‘I’ve been thinking about running away to sea. I hadn’t decided whether I was going to be a jolly tar dancing a hornpipe or a pirate out of Tortuga with a pair of pistols and an enormous rainbow bird on my shoulder. But if you want to be pirate sails, then my decision is made.’
‘What about Father?’ asked the curtains.
‘Oh, he died last night,’ Mother said. ‘I found him at the foot of the bed, all shrunken and flat. At first I thought he was a hot water bottle! But I suppose I shall pack him in my case.’
‘Huzzah!’ cried the curtains.
In Tortuga, Mother and her curtains attracted a crew of sensitive and hygienic pirates who cared about the little things almost as much as they cared about loot. The sea air agreed with Father, who came back to life as Hibiscus, the ship’s cat, a great black velvet creature with an assassin’s mind and a penchant for turning up in the dreams of captains who were fated to die at the hands of Mother’s elegant crew.
As for the curtains, they swelled continually with the trade winds, sure of themselves at last.
BEACH RUBBLE
‘I’m a bona fide crone, honey. I have a thousand wrinkles, but if that doesn’t bother you, come and visit me.’
She identified herself as Melusine. Her avatar was classically human, with black wavy hair and an elegant, mature olive-skinned face. She was wearing an unbelted black kimono coat, ivory silk pants, pearl jewellery. Around her you could smell a dry chypre scent. Her appearance and her way of speaking didn’t seem like the efforts of a young person play-acting. I felt sure she was genuine, my certainty bolstered by a little sly hope. I’ve always had a thing for older women.
My avatar was a thrown-together collage of tattoos, liquids and volcanic light in a loosely humanoid form. It had stars in its eyes, tiny suns and meteors dancing around like tadpoles in the oozy pupils. I didn’t tell her I was only seventeen. I assumed my youth was obvious.
‘I’d like to,’ I said. In the absence of a mouth to smile with I made my face do a coruscating shimmy.
She handed me a mandala-shaped passkey and faded out of the V-lounge.
When I visited her in her tower beside the tropical, madly turquoise sea that was also hers, I wore a new avatar that was basically me as I am in the flesh, tweaked to be a little more athletic of build and chiselled of profile than me au naturel. I liked the way it looked in the maroon pleated slacks and white open-collared shirt I’d chosen for a costume, but I was less happy with the face. With my tourist-class moodware – even though I’d forked out for the Artiface extension – I wasn’t able to achieve a really lifelike quality of expression.
Apart from wardrobe switches between classy outfits, Melusine’s avatar never changed. She looked more like a real human than anyone I’d ever met in V. One day I got around to telling her this. Our avatars had been lovers for a few weeks, and I was starting to love more than just the sensations of being with her. We were sitting in cane armchairs in the circular space she called the tea room, though we never drank tea there. A drone in a white caftan brought us gin and tonics and panatelas out of a carved humidor. The room was decorated with old prints and dwarf palms in African pots. Big windows faced the sea, where dhows and a couple of sailing schooners were drifting around in a world of sun-ignited blue. You could hear the sea and the murmur of the town below the tower.
‘Well, the server plays a part,’ Melusine said, looking out at her world. ‘But it isn’t only that. Reality comes with age. A sapling isn’t a tree, a caterpillar isn’t a butterfly. Until you get there, you can only fake it. No matter what we do, the soul shows its stuff, even in here. Perhaps especially in here.’
I raised an eyebrow. ‘If you don’t think I exist every bit as much as you do, just because I’m young, then you’d better ditch me for an ageing lothario.’
‘My dear Zack, I am an ageing lothario. Anyhow, I was complimenting you. Young people are stage magicians, and for that I like you. If I were so fond of reality, would I have had myself lifted? I doubt the poor old carcass is worth much of a look these days.’
She claimed to have been one of the very first migrants out of the flesh: ‘When there were great beasts on the earth, Zack. When many a marvel existed in the world, I also ex
isted.’
After a pause in which she drained her glass, she said, ‘For crying out loud, don’t listen when I talk through my hat. Or do listen, but notice the hat.’ Then she changed the subject. ‘Shall we go and see what the trade winds have brought in?’
‘Sure,’ I said.
Technically, we didn’t have to walk down the stairs. We could have just jumped out of the window, but then we’d have missed all the glass and mosaic and gold and silver treasures Melusine kept in niches on the staircase. It was all clip art, she’d confided to me – but she had good taste.
In this phase of her life she was a collector, she said – ‘but only of bargains.’ Beachcombing was one way she could get something for nothing. Queuing in the soup kitchen of art, she called it. Her crying poor was obviously an affectation. Poor people didn’t get lifted.
At the bottom of the stairs we went through a blue door with a fanlight, out into the garden of palms and oleanders. A walk under the trees took us down to the sunny, weathered town of whitewashed houses that followed a relaxed maze of streets. Dark-skinned drones simulated a bustling population. The slightly breezy warmth of the air and its salty ocean smell were particularly well done.
The weather was the same whenever I’d been there. ‘Really it ought to be hotter than this,’ Melusine had said. ‘But this is my perfect day.’
She had told me she was born in Zanzibar and that the town was based on the island’s old capital, Stone Town. Many of the houses had the carved doors the real Stone Town was famous for. However, from other conversations we’d had it was obvious that she placed Zanzibar on the wrong side of Africa, off the coast of Gabon.