King of Morning, Queen of Day

by Ian McDonald

  “God, are we dead?” Caldwell asked suddenly.

  The mist moved across the hillside, changeless in its everchangingness. And, in the changing changelessness, an area of stability, certainty; a dark shape. A dark shape approaching. Terror seized the two men’s souls. The dark approaching shape loomed huge in the distorted perspective of the mist, and became human.

  The human broke into a run.

  Jessica hurled herself upon her father and he swallowed her up in his arms. And at that most intimate range too close for words, tears and touching and the deep, wordless expression of the soul were all the communication they needed. A wind sprang up, whipped the reluctant mist like a sow dawdling to market. Rents of blue appeared above; the sun seemingly raced across the clearing sky. The mist tore on the jagged tips of the trees, minute by minute the world made itself more visible.

  Father to daughter: What happened?

  Daughter to father: Don’t ask. I can never say.

  Father: Can’t say, won’t say?

  Daughter: Can’t say. I decided. That’s all.

  He: You decided for me? For us?

  She: I decided for me. I decided for life.

  The mist was gone, the sky early high-summer-afternoon blue. Memories of heat, of warmth, of summer began to steal across the hillside. Across the bay, Knocknarea rose green and purple and beyond if, the hills of County Mayo. And beyond them, the ocean; and beyond the great ocean, a new land, a new world, where summer was also come. And beyond that, other oceans, other lands, other summers, and seasons; the great sea, the wide world. Enough for any life. Down there, where the ribbons of road laced between the fields, it all began.

  With one footstep.

  They walked down among the bodies of the birds, to the trees where it all would begin to happen.

  PART III

  CODA

  LATE SUMMER

  THEY HAD CYCLED SO far, through the old Victorian suburbs and the new municipal housing developments spilling like salt across the lower slopes of the mountains, out of Dublin, up into the mountains, along the old military road, and where the road could no longer take them they had abandoned the bicycles by the side of an old stone bridge and walked on, up into the heath and the heather, two figures on a hillside, wading thigh-deep through bee-busy purple heather, she with the rug and the thermos, he with the picnic basket he’d carried balanced so carefully on the back of his bicycle all those miles climbing up up up away from the city into the mountains of County Wicklow, and the bees were humming, and high above a lark was diving up through the clear air, up up up, the sun was so hot and the scent of the moorland flowers so powerful she felt she must swoon and fall among the bracken and springy purple heather, was he not done yet, not he; forging on tireless as an ox, up up up over the boulders and crumbling black peat, up up up into the land of the lark and the myrtle, the high places where sheep with patches of red or blue on their rumps looked up from their coarse grazing and cantered skittishly away, shit-clogged tails swinging heavily; she looked at him, his shadow against the sun, strong, tireless as an ox this Owen MacColl, son of builders, red-brick, utility-built with sure and solid foundations, no major structural defects and all internal and external timbers guaranteed free from rot for ten years; she could watch him forever, toiling up the sheep paths through the bog-myrtle, she loved to watch the way his body moved, solidly, certainly, she wished he would take his shirt off, she would have loved to have seen the play of light on his sweat, loved to have caught the perfume of that sweat, honey-sweet, salt-sour, on the light airs of the hills; even though she knew he stripped to the waist in summer like the rest of squad she knew he would never do it alone with her, it is one thing with a gang of mates; it is quite another with a woman beneath God’s blue sky with the lark ascending; oh, he was daring enough—he’d kissed her, mouth open, like they do in France, that first time, in the Atheneum Ballroom, she hadn’t expected it, he had taken her by surprise, for a moment she hadn’t been sure she liked the quick, hard dart of his tongue into her mouth, but she knew Em and Rozzie were watching (Colm the apprentice tiler was long history, once again Em was coursing the spangled dance floor like a shark, five months’ gone and Rozzie’s baby still didn’t show, her Hoover salesman had found Liverpool the better part of valour, but her father knew a surgeon on Harcourt Street) and she was damned if she was going to look like a clumsy fifteen-year-old in front of two girls who claimed to have actually done it, though proof positive of having departed the blessed state of virginhood was only conclusive in one instance, so she had pressed her tongue into his mouth and felt his teeth close gently on it and she’d felt something not quite like anything she’d ever felt before ignite a smooth, slow burn, like the engine of a limousine, down below her belly button, and she’d known then that he could do what he liked, whatever he liked, whatever he asked, and she wouldn’t mind, not one bit; hello, what was he at now? he’d found a place for them to eat, where the bank of the stream they had been following had been cut away in a small cliff by the torrents of winter, a quiet place, a secret place, with moss and heather for a bed and rover-smoothed boulders for a table, a table in the wilderness, where was that from? the Bible, was it? she spread the rug on the moss, thinking, This would be a grand place to do it, where only the sky and the lark can see us, and as he unpacked plates cups knives forks spoons sugar salt sandwiches cold chicken cold ham cold tongue Scotch eggs from Dlugash the Butchers fruit brack faery cakes tins of Bournville chocolate, she stood on the stream-polished boulders and looked down the little valley the stream had cut to the greater valley below where two threads, many threads, of silver were spun into a single cord and the cars moved like sluggish black beetles, furious with the heat, through the haze and shimmer bouncing from the Military Road, he called her and everything was ready and laid out for her pleasure, with the sole exception of himself, and as she ate the sandwiches and the chicken and the ham and the tongue and the Scotch eggs from Dlugash the Butchers and the fruit brack and the faery cake and the Bournville chocolate and drank the tea from the thermos, she watched the way his lips closed upon the food, could not tear her eyes away from the way his lips closed upon those morsels of food, and she knew one word and only one word kept what they wanted to happen from happening, and neither of them dared to ask the other what that word might be for fear that they might speak it, so that her hand shook when she held up her cup to ask for more tea and his hand shook as he poured it from the thermos, and hot tea with milk and two sugars spilled over his shirt, his suspenders, his flannels, soaked and burning in the same instant, and he leaped up with a cry and she leaped up with a cry and said “Take it off, your shirt, off, get it off,” and he took his shirt off, and then she said, “Take them off, your pants, off, get them off,” and he took them off and she said, “Take them off, all your clothes, off, take them off,” and he did, and she looked at him standing there under the river cliff, cut by many winters, in the beauty of his nakedness, and the word neither of them had dared speak was spoken and she came to him and he to her and they went down together on the bed of heather and bracken, on the rug she had carried up from the city on the back of her bicycle, like lovers from old old legends, and under the hot sun with the bees swimming lazily about them, heavy with nectar, she opened to him and he entered her and pushed pushed pushed and she went oh oh oh afraid that she was going to die afraid that she was not going to die from something wonderful and terrible at the same time, like God, she thought on the heather and bracken bed with her knees up and he pumping pumping pumping away and up up up she was going to explode, a rain of Jessica Caldwell age seventeen and three-quarters coming down in red rags and scraps all over the heather and the stray sheep, oh oh oh and then he came half in and half out and as he did she felt something go click! in her head and with that click the visions that had been crowding in around the edge of her field of view for so long she could never remember a time when they were not there disappeared; gone, vanished, and she cried a little and he d
ied a little and that was all the poetry that was in it; then she looked over his shoulders and through the tears, the unexpected tears, she saw two boulders and two trees and two birds in the clear air and two figures tiny tiny walking away far far out across the summer hillsides.

  PART IV SHEKINAH

  Arise, shine, for your light has come,

  and the glory of the Lord has risen:

  Isaiah 60:1

  IT IS NOT MUCH of a party. But then advertising parties never are. The music is too ideologically correct to be really danceable; the people are trying too hard to have fun to be really enjoying themselves. Someone will probably be arrested before dawn, everyone hopes. Only then can the party to celebrate winning the Green Isle Freezer Foods account be judged a success. Junior copywriters and assistant financial managers are lining up to take turns singing to a karaoke machine, heavy on Elvis and the Beatles. Says a lot about the vintage of QHPSL’s junior copywriters and assistant financial managers. The Blessèd Phaedra, the boss, despite her name, Enye does not like, is thundering out “River Deep, Mountain High” in a skirt far too short for her seniority. Oscar the Bastard, the boss, whom Enye does like, despite his name, is doing a passable, if balding, Ike on the Mike.

  Warping social orbits, she finds Jaypee Kinsella, her creative partner, confidante, mentor, and, yes, Best Friend, sitting under a shelf bearing a lamp in the shape of a brass Buddha seated on the back of a cow. She slips onto the arm of the chair beside him. Grossly drunk, he demonstrates how he can make the brass Buddha go on off on off on off on off like a karmic lighthouse, calling souls across the rocky Sea of Enlightenment. He seems to find the exercise hysterically funny.

  In the room with the karaoke machine, Judi-Angel from Traffic, whose house this bash has appropriated, is singing about the Careless Whisper of a Good Friend as if it is something she knows a lot about.

  Enye begs leave to be excused. Between the end of one note and the beginning of another, between the end of one chronal quantum and the beginning of the next, she has felt them. Distant yet, like the dim thunder of the jets that bank in over the city, but drawing closer, growing in definition and clarity.

  On the street, the presence is sharper, clearer. She shivers. Her breath hangs in thin clouds, faintly luminous under the acid yellow street lamps. In the car she pops the first tab of Shekinah and clicks Mahler’s Sixth into the stereo. As the passionate tide of strings and winds surges between the speakers, she lies back in the seat and waits for the stuff to take effect.

  It is never long coming, but she has never been able to give a precise moment to when it begins. She can never say when they move from something felt to something perceived. A police patrol car prowls past the end of the street. She hopes none of the neighbours have complained about the ideologically correct dance music. Keep moving, Fascists.

  She starts the car, moves off down the street. Drizzle-wet, the October faces of the red-brick town houses seem black in the standardised European yellow streetlight. At this hour the avenues are empty but for taxis, police, and ghosts. Led by the twine of the sky signs, like the polarized stress patterns in car windows, she drives to a damp northern suburb of aluminum-clad boxes where every street has a name like Padraig Pearse Gardens, where every tin-town house has a portrait of the Pope in front of the net jardiniere living-room curtains and a ten-meter whip of an aerial to hook down the airwaves of the TV stations across the water from their higher ether. At some indeterminate point, the drizzle has passed into sour yellow rain.

  The sky signs draw her to a small suburban supermarket. Fluorescent pink and orange posters proclaiming This Week’s Special Offers sag from their tape fastenings behind the metal security grilles. The interior of the supermarket is lit horror-movie blue by the refrigerated displays. The red eye of the burglar alarm system winks at her. The rush and flow from beyond buffets her like a mighty wind as she steps out of the Citroen 2CV. She kicks off her party shoes, fetches a pair of Reeboks from the back. Bright red. They clash with her party clothes. She wishes she could change those, too, but if shoes are all she is to be allowed, that is all she needs.

  Check.

  In her handbag, the computer is winking green to the burglar alarm’s red. Graph lines twine black on grey on the readout. She slips the computer onto her belt, untangles a coiled lead terminating in a multiway connector.

  Check.

  Still wrapped in old newspapers on the floor in front of the back seat: the swords. Katana and tachi. Long sword and companion sword. She slips them from their sheathes. Kenjitsu, the Way of the Drawn Sword. Philosophic and moral considerations pay homage to victory in combat.

  The spirits rise within her: spirit of expectancy, spirit of trepidation, spirit of fire, spirit of void, spirit of small suburban supermarket at twenty past one on a Saturday morning with veils of drizzle blowing in off a chill, radioactive sea.

  Spirit of crossing at a ford, of taking your capabilities to meet your enemy’s in the place and time of your choosing.

  Never let your enemy see your spirit. Be neither over nor underspirited. Both are weak.

  She advances through the driving rain down the entry leading to the rear-of-store car park. By the roll-down delivery door, she plugs the computer into the socket mounted on the handle of her long sword. Words, symbols, forms too fleeting for human comprehension fill the small display: the words DISRUPTOR LOADED flash, silver on grey. Grey on silver, glyphs swarm from the habaki, the sword hilt, along the blade, an ideographic miscegenation of Chinese and Mayan. Within one second, the blade is sheathed in a shifting patina of silver glyphs.

  She advances across the rain-wet concrete toward a lager hoarding. She can feel them as an electric tautness in the skin across her forehead.

  A sound, a scuffle in the warm shadows around the gently sighing hearing ducts.

  Action/no-action. Conception/no-conception. The swords whip into Gedan No Kame, tachi above head, katana held downward at forty-five degrees.

  Hi-tech trainers scuff gravel. Betrayed, the syringe glitters in stray suburb-glow. Something-teen, greasy black hair, Day-Glo Wyldechylde T-shirt, severed heads, pentagrams, and bondage.

  Caught crouching in the warmth of the ducts, the boy throws back his head and opens wide his mouth, as if to swallow down the raining sky.

  And it spears from the open mouth: a long worm of intestinal darkness, lashing and writhing in the driving diagonals of rain that slash across the car park. Head, arms, legs bifurcate and tear free from the flexing body. In an instant, one instant, it steps out of the pile of rain-sodden clothing, the translucent, luminous husk of the boy’s body.

  It towers over her, tall, thin as a willow. Its thin willow fingers are thirty centimetres of razor-blue steel. Its mouth is fused shut in a plate of whalebone; its naked skull sweeps up into an arabesque of raw cranium. It is dressed only in its own leather hide and a few scraps of clinging, pale human skin.

  She strikes in one timing: the skill of striking the enemy while he is still undecided, spirit and body unsettled from the transformation. Steel rings on steel. It catches her cutting edge on its claws. Steel shrieks on steel as blade rakes along blade. Glyphs shower from the edge and burst about them like dying fireworks.

  It heaves her back across the car park, follows closely, but she is on her feet in a thought, red Reeboks firm on the wet concrete. She flicks rain-slick hair from her eyes. The Shekinah is a burning song inside her. Nihon Me: the long sword flashes upward, sideways, into the Jodan, the middle position, to cut through the chest. Ippon Me, the companion sword, turns, catches the light, high to cleave the crest of bone. They clash in a flicker of steel and rain. All strategy is to cut the enemy. Hitting, striking, touching the enemy, is not cutting. Its blades gleam with stolen light; the long sword slips up to Jodan to block their downstrike. The blow almost tears the sword from her grasp. Thought and action, one unity. The short sword in the left hand cuts across from Waki through Chudan.

  “Tō”

 
The great kiai explodes from her lips. The right arm, severed just below the elbow, spins away. Steel claws scrape sparks from the concrete.

  Pale ichor fountains from the stump. It reels and in that instant begins to regenerate itself. Spraying dream-juice from the horrifying wound, it drives her before its singing steel claws across the car park. Lightning screams and flies from the clashing, parrying blades. It drives her hard, hard enough to momentarily take the breath from her, hard against the lager hoarding. Five times thirty centimetres of razor-blue steel shred the blue and piss-yellow of the lager poster and draw back for the killing thrust through the throat.

  And in that quantum of indecision, the long sword moves with the deceptive slowness of the flowing water cut.

  It all happens in one timing. The look of disbelief that momentarily crosses its face as its head topples toward the damp concrete, which is never reached as, in one timing, body and severed head erupt in a silent detonation of thistledown sparks. The outline of her adversary burns briefly through the glow, then all that remains is a fading nimbus and a handful of errant, luminous puffballs bouncing across the car park.

  She bows properly, formally, to an honourable enemy, kneels to unplug the long sword. The glyphs fade and fail. The rain drives in hard, hard across the concrete. She is shaking, dripping with sweat. And weary, so weary. Bone weary. Spirit weary. It is always like this, after the Shekinah. She picks up her swords, returns to the car. She leans, one-handed, head down, against the door, the classic three A.M. pose, wracked with nausea, saturated, shivering in her party clothes. She knows it is dangerous to drive in her condition, but she has no other choice. Twenty past two. She gets into the car and finds that someone has got in before her and stolen her cassette player and all her tapes.