I heard enough tales to fill a book, and mayhap someday I shall write it, if Abraham ben Zaccheus gives me the go-ahead, which to date he has not. But if he does not want his stories to be known to the world, why tell them to Mr. Bob Chambers? And why engage my services as he personal amanuensis?
At last it was Mr. Bob Chambers’ turn to speak. Between sips of wine and nibbles of food, he spoke of the entertainment to come. An Eye Tallian composer fellow with a name that sounded something like Gasparo Spontini had read his book The King in Yellow, he said, and liked it so much that he sent a letter to Mr. Chambers and said if Mr. Chambers would write something called a libretto he’d write the score to go with it, which I took it to mean words and music in musician talk. Mr. Chambers told Signore Spontini he’d do it, so they got together wrote a whole opera called The King in Yellow.
And that, Mr. Chambers told King Abraham and me, was the special treat. “We’re opening at the Maison de Rêves on Sutter Street. I am surprised that you didn’t know about it, even if you only received my letter yesterday.”
“Ah,” King Abraham said, “John O’Leary and I have been tending to a little task to the west of here, and have been out of touch with events in the city.” He paused, then went on. “But please tell me about the production.”
“It was easy enough for me to create a libretto from my tales and from the original play. And Spontini is a genius. He created a remarkable score, alternately beautiful, jarring, wildly stimulating and almost unbearably sensuous. I think Spontini is writing the music of the future. I have never heard anything remotely like it.”
“And when may I hope to hear this work?” King Abraham asked.
Mr. Chambers pulled a turnip from his vest pocket, consulted it, and slid it back from sight. “In an hour, Abraham!”
King Abraham looked surprised. “It is nearly three in the morning,” he exclaimed.
“A special command performance, Abraham. For you and your associate, Mr. O’Leary. The production opens tomorrow night. Or should I say, tonight? The company is assembled at the theater. They are in full costume. The set is built. I designed it myself and personally supervised the design of the sets and flats.”
He stood up and threw his arms out as if to embrace Abraham and me and the whole wide world.
“Come, come my friends. You will experience something unlike anything you have experienced in your lives!”
We walked through the fog, crossing Market Street and up Sutter. The Palais d’Or behind us was dark now, all but invisible against the black sky and thick, gray fog. The night air was so damp that rivulets condensed and ran down our faces. We must have made a ghostly sight, three of us clad in black clothing and white shirts, with Abraham ben Zaccheus’s vest blazoned with Hebrew signs in gold and blue, the ferrule of the King’s walking stick clicking on the pavement with each step he took.
The fog had a strange and unpleasant smell to it. I thought I heard a peculiar sound and felt the very earth tremble beneath my feet.
We reached the theater and were greeted by Signore Spontini himself, decked out as were we three. His hair was wavy and he wore a pointed moustache. He was a heavyset man. The Eye Tallians do love their pasta, I thought, but I shook his hand anyway. He led us to our seats and waddled to the front of the auditorium. He climbed to the conductor’s stand, picked up his baton, and waved the musicians to life.
Overhead they had hung a glorious chandelier. It was made of a thousand diamonds and lighted by a hundred candles that filled the auditorium with a dazzling blizzard of light.
It was true, what Bob Chambers had told us at the Palais d’Or, the music of Signore Spontini was not like anything I had ever heard in my life.
The curtains drew back and I saw another world. There was a city on the stage, a city half in ruins that looked as if it had once been as mighty as Rome or Paris or San Francisco, but was now almost deserted.
The king of the city was named Yhtill. He wore a garment that might once have been a robe of golden cloth but was now in shreds, like the shroud of a corpse that has lain in the earth for a hundred years or a thousand. He wore a gleaming crown of gold and diamonds, and a golden mask with slits for his eyes.
The play went on. King Yhtill had two daughters, two beautiful princesses. The first of the princesses was named Camilla and she wore a gown of palest orange that seemed to spring into flaring crimson flame as she whirled and sang her arias to the sound of the orchestra. Her hair was shimmering silver and hung about her shoulders, and stood away from her face like the wings of a white dove when she twirled.
She stood beside a dark body of water, the Lake of Hali. The time was dawn or sunset, I could not tell. There were two suns in the black sky over the city, a city called Carcosa.
I felt the theater shake, heard a rumble, smelled the strange odor I had smelled outside in the street.
The second princess appeared. Tall she was, and she took away my breath. She wore a gown of palest green that sprang into searing green flame as she whirled and sang her arias to the sound of the orchestra. Her name was Cassilda.
She sang, Along the shore the cloud waves break, the twin suns sink beneath the lake, the shadows lengthen in Carcosa.
Her hair was as black as Satan’s heart, her eyes as green as Ireland’s fields, her skin as white as New Year’s snow, her lips as full as dark red cherries, her breasts as soft and dear as heaven’s clouds. Her hair hung about her shoulders, and stood away from her face like the wings of a black raven when she twirled.
She was my Maeve.
She was my Maeve.
My heart was pounding, the tympani in the orchestra were pounding, Signore Spontini was waving his arms as he conducted the musicians. Horns blared and strings screamed and Cassilda who was Maeve, who was my living dearest Maeve, sang in a voice as high and as clear and as grieving as an angel expelled from Heaven by God Almighty, Song of my soul, my voice is dead, die thou, unsung, as tears unshed, shall dry and die in lost Carcosa.
With a sound like ten million champagne glasses shattering, the grand chandelier crashed on the rows of empty seats. With a sound like ten million tympani pounding, the roof above the stage crashed down. There was no warning. There was no escape. The painted suns, the artificial lake, were crushed. The singers were crushed. King Ythill, the Princess Camilla, the Princess Cassilda, my Maeve, my darling girl Maeve, were crushed.
The Maison de Rêves was no more.
I looked around me. The sun had risen over San Francisco but the earth had shaken the beautiful city as a dog shakes an annoying flea. Smoke rose all about. The sky was black with it, and then flames rose. Men, women, and children screamed and moaned and wept.
A miracle had saved King Abraham and Robert Chambers and me. Somehow in the rubble of the Maison de Rêves, we had escaped with naught worse than a few scrapes and bruises. But of the players and the orchestra, none survived. None.
I threw back my arms and looked into the sky, into the clouds of smoke and the growing flames, and cursed the cruel God for sparing my life.
King Wolf
By Anna Tambour
Hour after hour the car sped on, the last town with multiple turnoffs being Wollongong. Now the signs were for turnoffs. Old Erowal Bay, Sussex Inlet, Beachside Lots Just Opened. Swan Lake Caravan Park, a surf shop. Signs on the road with nothing to show for them but trees. Yerriyong State Forest, Luncheon Creek Road, Manyana . . .
Crows jumped out of the way of tyres just fast enough to miss being hit, but there were rich pickings—wombats, wallabies, a few rosella parrots caught with their heads down into seeding weeds, and magpies that also picked the kills but weren’t as quick as crows.
Now the traffic was erratic, thin, nothing local—car and truck smashing into the slow-spinning clouds of mating flying ants. Windscreen wipers already sticky from acacia fluff worked hard to remove greasy showers. A few cautious drivers turned their night lights on.
Inside the car, air-con stirred the sultry coolness.
>
“You don’t get that report to me by Monday, I’ll serve your balls to my dog!”
In the middle of the middle-back seat, Lovage Carr leaned over in her child-restraint seat and whispered to her oldest brother, Safire, “What dog?”
In the back seat, eight-year-old Wolf unbuckled his seatbelt and turned around till he was looking forward, his head between them. “What balls?”
“Tennis balls,” said Safire, aiming a punch backwards.
Wolf laughed. “Come on, he muttered. “Tell Lovie about our dog. Dad’s such a family man.”
Emrald, Safire’s twelve-year-old twin, twisted awkwardly against her seatbelt in the cramped space on the other side of Lovage. “Don’t.”
“What’m I doing,” Wolf whined. “We shouldn’t let her get her hopes up. And besides, you know what Mum has said about dogs carrying hydatids.”
“Like what Dad does about kids carrying childhood,” Safire snickered. “He’s right, Em. They hate dogs. And if she asks one more time . . .”
In the front passenger seat, their mother pulled out an ear bud and a faint tinkle of étude leaked. Then she put her ear bud back in.
They were talking so low that Lovage didn’t listen, and anyway she was thinking of the dog. She had been playing with Pobblebonk, pretending he was a frog prince, but dropped him when she heard dog. Maybe Daddy was angry at someone who was supposed to deliver a dog to meet her as soon as the whole family got home. And she and the dog—she’d already named him Lion—would go in the back garden where Lion would bend his head so that she could ride him, and then they’d parade in front of the flowers till the blue-headed ones bowed to her, and she’d slide off Lion’s back and he’d raise his right paw, and they’d play tennis.
The car speeded up, passing a truck. On both sides of the road, the trees looked like dark smudges.
“Fuckin fuck you!” their dad yelled. “I don’t care if you’ve got a tumour the size of a fuckin stadium. Monday at nine, complete with charts. And ex the excuses.” He slammed his left hand against the steering wheel. “Bastard!” His right clutched his phone, and though no one in the back seats could actually see, they could all imagine his thumb working away.
Lovage started shaking. But maybe he wasn’t as angry as he sounded. Sometimes it was hard to tell. He was always so busy that he was ‘short’ as he sometimes said when he apologised, as sometimes he did after he’d scared her and he and Mum had had a fight.
She clutched her lower lip between her teeth.
Safire unbuckled his seatbelt and turned sideways. He stroked her fine golden hair. Her face crumpled. He leaned out over her. “Em?”
Emrald had been desperately punching the remote control, and finally, the screen lit up.
Narnia!
Mute, but that didn’t matter. They all knew every word.
Lovage put her thumb in her mouth. At four, she should have outgrown such habits, but she should also have outgrown wetting her pants.
Safire gave Emrald a thumbs up and slid back to his seat, though his legs were even longer than Emrald’s.
“Saffa,” said Wolf. “Any chips left?”
“No.”
“You selfish pig,” Em whispered furiously. She leaned out over Lovie and snatched the bag of Smiths Salt and Vinegar off Safire’s lap. He grabbed for them and they both pulled. Only the size of Saffa’s feet muffled the shower. But they were such experienced fighters that none of this could be noticed in the front.
Wolf had already soundlessly buckled himself in again. No one else liked facing the road they’d been, but then no one else had an incentive to avoid seeing Narnia. Wolf was not only eight years old but with thick dark thatch and deep dark eyes, looked so much like the selfish little brother that he hoped Lovie would outgrow her fantasies of the four of them being special royals—Kings and Queens only lacking a kingdom waiting to be rescued by them, with him being the slimy, sweet-loving sinner so that they have someone they can nobly forgive.
He’d read the book version to see if it was just as bad. Although the book didn’t have any mug shots of him in it, he resented the story so much that he took revenge—and his crime made him feel good and bad at the same time, like going to bed without underwear.
It was a library book. He buried it in the sticky orange peels and gritty coffee grounds in the wet-food garbage bin. And the next day he confessed, when she was alone at the counter, to the nice librarian with the nametag that said Ursula. He told her that the book had slipped from his hands into the school toilet. He expected to pay for the book. That didn’t worry him, but to be banned from the library . . . But she leaned over the counter, smiled and whispered. “I did the same thing once. Don’t you worry. We’ll just adjust . . .” And she turned to the screen and tapped a bit.
“There,” she said, tossing her bright grey hair. “That copy never existed. But don’t go away.” She reached under the counter. “I pulled this from the withdrawn books before it could reach the sale table. I’ve kept it here for you. It’ll cost you, though! Twenty cents.”
It must have been one of those books that the librarians who don’t trust people had kept in the dungeon, saved from the shelves, but then it became just another old book adding to their piles.
On the cover, two dancing birds spread wings edged with feathers that stuck out like long, black-gloved fingers. The base of each wing bore a big lopsided yellow square—like trucks do on their back doors. The book had a strange, never-ending name—Animals and their Colors: Camouflage, Warning Coloration, Courtship and Territorial Display, Mimicry—and it was by Michael and Patricia Fogden. The publisher was Crown, Wolf was happy to note. There were publishers he favoured and others he thought untrustworthy.
He rushed home with it to look up, first, the meaning of yellow. He’d already read that yellow means Don’t eat me! in frogs, so he supposed that the yellow signs on trucks meant Don’t get close. But when these birds flash their patches, what could they mean but Come closer! Admire my beauty! Wolf had hoped to find out why yellow was his favourite colour, but he never did.
That was six months ago already. He looked down at his T-shirt printed with the kangaroo in the middle of the big yellow road sign and the unnecessary words: Kangaroos Crossing—a Christmas present from Em. He would have liked to wear it on an island with just her. The stupid words annoyed him. And he hated everyone looking at him, saying it suited him. But he didn’t want to hurt her feelings.
He always felt even more left out when he saw how much Saffa and Em played along with Lovie, always acting as if they were just putting up with it, not getting any ego trips themselves. “Lovie needs to play Wardrobe,” they’d say. So he had to play along, being the bad brother in this cruel world of make-believe that trapped him. He had to play or he’d be branded the selfish brother in real life, the one who made Lovie cry.
And though he didn’t want those know-it-alls, Saffa and Em, to know, Lovie’s tenderness always broke Wolf’s heart. He dreamed of Lovie, of a real big bad wolf slinking up behind her as she walked a trail of yellow bricks. And from out of nowhere, faster than an arrow, more toothy than a shark, he’d come running after that wolf. Just as that wolf that slathered after Lovie was ready to pounce on her, he’d leap. His long claws would slash that wolf’s hide down to the bones. That wolf’s spit would splat against the bricks on the path as its jaws shattered under his, Wolf’s! body, heavy as a load of rocks. And at that moment in Wolf’s dream, Lovie would turn around and notice that there was a big bad wolf spatted almost dead, under her brother Wolf, who had saved her. And she’d catch her lower lip in her teeth. And then he always woke up.
Wolf reached into the chest pocket of the stained and smelly jacket his mother called his second skin. He pulled out a book with a waterproof cover, opened it to a stray page, clipped his book light to it and turned the device on. In the grey light of dusk he watched the light unfold like a mutant finger, or god, and point its holy light down to a page. He glanced at it, closed his ey
es and mouthed the words. “Treatment for a broken shoulder . . . ”
“Would you fucking credit it!”
Alex Carr hit the steering wheel so hard with his left hand that he dislodged his earpiece. It dangled loose over his right ear.
“Would you mind?” Simone removed her earbuds. Piano streamed from her lap. She took off her reading glasses, placed them in the case on her lap, and lowered the screen she’d been looking at.
Her husband stopped in the middle of readjusting his earpiece. He threw up his hands. “You and your Darcy!”
“We’ve had enough of your histrionics, thank you,” Simone said, looking straight ahead, not at his hands waving free of the steering wheel. “I’ve got work too, may I remind you, and you just juggle team members and money. If you had to place and juggle kids! One day in DOCS and you’d be begging me to trade. Besides, we’re time poor and you waste it on what, your sainted grandmother nun you’ve never met before? This house you say he has, had, in Hunters Hill? No one else turned up except that funeral vulture. I told you it wasn’t worth the inheritance to drive from Melbourne to Sydney.”
He’d been humming to himself, tapping his phone, but stopped. “You wouldn’t know worth if it—!”
She turned to him. “I learned.” And she bowed her head and picked up her glasses case. If she was trying to conceal her smile, she was failing.
“You learned shit!” His earpiece fell onto his lap . “So you read free ancient romances! on a pad I gave you! So you groove to Chopin. How refined! You wouldn’t know worth if—”
She picked up the pad. “I learned what someone isn’t worth.”
He picked up the earpiece and threw it at her pad. It bounced off, falling onto her lap.
She brushed the earpiece off as if it were a spider, and stamped and ground it into the carpet.
A Season In Carcosa Page 18