The Fall of the Families

by Phillip Mann

  21

  ON BENNET

  “Why is she smiling?”

  It is Pawl speaking, but he is not speaking to anyone. The dark room is empty. He has ordered everyone to keep away.

  He stands at the side of the table, where Laurel is lying on velvet cushions. He stares down at her smiling face. Her eyes are closed. It is extraordinary. He sees a sleeping, smiling face. “Did she die happy? Was she glad to die?”

  Pawl moves round the table, his fingers trailing on the red velvet. The stillness amazes him. He has never seen anything so still as the face of his dead wife. At any moment he expects her to stir, breathe deeply and stretch, and for her eyes to blink open. But she doesn’t.

  Pawl gets down on his knees at the end of the table and rests his cheek on the velvet. He can still smell something of her life. He can still smell something of the sea that drowned her. She has been washed, and her nakedness covered, and her hair brushed, and that is all. He looks at her nose and the delicate flare of her nostrils. He sees the way the nose curves down to where the lips curve open. Why had he never seen before that beautiful folding of space. “Why did I never see that? I saw the eyes and the tousled hair and the warm lips. Perhaps they took all my love.”

  Now Pawl is discovering a new Laurel, one he will carry with him until his death.

  He stands up and steps away from the body. He is still pondering that curve. It reminds him of part of a spiral seashell. I must tell Laurel about this, he thinks and then stops with a start as his conscious mind catches his imagination. He manages a dry laugh at his foolishness.

  Reality has not yet caught up with him. Once when he was a boy he watched some stone masons mending a bridge. The air was freezing, and the masons blew on their hands as they shifted and worked the rough stone. One was shaping a groove, hammering down on a thick chisel. For a moment his attention lapsed. The hammer glanced from the shiny head of the chisel and came down squarely on his thumb, trapping it against the stone. The thumb spread and spattered. The man looked at his thumb, his mouth and eyes open wide. He even held it up in the cold air and watched as it started to drip. He was waiting for the pain.

  Such is the state of Pawl Paxwax.

  Now it is nighttime and the curtains are drawn and a fire blazes in the hearth of the old room.

  Pawl is seated in an armchair with his back to the fire. All that can be seen of him is his white hand, which rests on the arm of the chair holding a glass, and his eyes. The eyes glow like disks of flint. He stares at the still form on the table.

  Close by lies his great mechanical dog, the last of its line. It tries to scratch under its chin with a rear leg but the movement is beyond it. It does not understand how time has ruined it. The firelight glances on its great shaggy back, sending its shadow across the floor.

  At the far end of the room, well away from the fire, stands the Member of the Inner Circle.

  He is the only living presence that Pawl will tolerate. Gently Odin is working on Pawl, easing open the closed seams of his grief.

  There are yet several hours to dawn.

  Finally the dawn seeps slowly into the sky. In the night it has rained, a chill slapping rain that has filled the dry leaves and soaked the lawn, leaving it grey and glazed.

  The people of the Paxwax are moving, carrying bundles of dry sticks. They are building a pyre amid the flower gardens.

  Carpenters have laboured during the night to build a platform of seasoned timber. Upon the platform lies the body of Laurel Paxwax. The wind stirs her hair and moves the brightly coloured dress and scarf which she wears round her throat.

  Pawl relinquished the body an hour before dawn and Lan Tancred and his wife have worked quickly, trying to create an image of life in death.

  “It will burn quickly,” whispers Lan Tancred to Bevis the woodsman as they stand to one side in the grey dawn light. “I saw to that.”

  Pawl thrusts the flame into the pyre. He seems almost casual. The fire catches and a plume of dark smoke mounts past the old house and disperses in the wind. The flames crackle yellow and white and the first long flame singes the hem of Laurel’s dress, which has blown down from the platform. The fabric puckers and darkens.

  Now the flames are rising like a curtain. The sea wood burns a bright green and blue. Laurel is lost in the smoke, except when the wind blows it aside and makes the flames billow.

  The body burns quickly, as Lan Tancred said it would. Pawl watches everything. No one speaks to him. He is a dark figure by the fire. And when the blaze is ended and there is only ash and embers, the rain comes.

  “She is not dead, you know that, don’t you?” says Pawl catching Peron by the arm.

  “She is dead,” says Peron.

  “Not so. She lives here. She will always live here.” He taps his forehead with his middle finger. “She is with me whenever I need her.” And he walks away, talking about what he and Laurel will do the next day.

  Thus Peron was the first to see the madness of Pawl.

  That night Pawl stayed in his Tower alone.

  He completed his last poem, for suddenly the zest had gone out of his art. Life in all its needless cruelty had caught him up and torn him and there was no way that words could relieve that suffering.

  22

  ON BENNET

  Here is what Pawl wrote, sitting alone, save for Punic and the bowed shape of little Odin.

  Song to a Sad Fisherman

  His net is deep,

  It trails the floor of the ocean.

  Stiff backed at evening, still in his small boat,

  Brown fingers light on the tiller’s smooth wood.

  What does he stare at, the shifting black water,

  Or the mist that muffles the shape of the islands?

  His net is deep,

  It curves by coral and shipwreck.

  He hears the slap of the small waves lapping,

  Hears too the boom of the great sea combers,

  Driven by storm winds, breaching the headland,

  Scouring the shore and the bases of cliffs.

  His net is deep,

  It drifts through beds of kelp and wrack.

  Soon will the fisherman pull on the taut rope,

  Lifting his net from the deep of the sea.

  What will he find there, what haul of sorrows,

  When the weeping black net lies coiled at his feet?

  23

  ON BENNET

  Pawl’s madness was, like Hamlet’s, a necessary madness; a wilful plunge into the stranger reaches of his imagination so that he could return sane.

  He talked to Laurel incessantly. There were always two places set for meals. Her clothes were washed, though unworn. Pawl remained genial, with a brittle smile, and he would break off conversations suddenly and run away as though called.

  Sometimes he tramped round the island. Once he waded into the sea and talked to the sea, slapping it with the palms of his open hands.

  His people watched him. There was always someone on guard to make sure he did not suffer any accidents.

  In speaking to the other members of the Eleven Great Families, Pawl chattered happily about what he and Laurel were doing.

  Sometimes a blackness would fill him. Once he ordered all the horses killed. Red drove them away into the wilderness of the Mendel Hills to save them. Once he ordered part of the woods burned and he stood in his Tower and watched as the flames ate their way to the shore and the black smoke billowed.

  Secretly he sent orders to the artisans of Larksong and, within days, crates began to appear through the Way Gate and were shuttled down to the surface.

  Pawl gathered everyone together when he began to open the crates in the courtyard. Inside were dummies, lifesize replicas of Laurel, shocking in their verisimilitude. People turned their eyes away.

  Clothed in Laurel’s clothes, the mannikins were dispersed through the island.

  Walking through the woods you would come upon Laurel sitting under a tree holding a dying flower
. She was down by the sea shore, looking at the waves. In the library she sat close to where Peron worked and he did his best to ignore her. She was in the courtyards, in the greenhouses, in the shuttle port and even, it was said, in Pawl’s bed.

  In ones and twos, slowly, not a mass exodus, people began to pack up and move from Pawl’s island. There was talk of madness in the Paxwax family and “like father like son” was an expression heard more than once behind closed doors. But for those who left there were always new arrivals and at least in a superficial sense the island retained its atmosphere of bustle and activity.

  Strangely, the arrival of the mannikins led to a worsening of Pawl’s temper. He strode round the house finding fault with everything. He took to carrying a stick which he used to beat on doors and to strike at objects which suddenly annoyed him.

  He was dirty, unshaven and smelled.

  Then one evening he summoned Odin.

  That small creature had begun to dread Pawl. His mind was as dangerous as a spinning knife. It was unguessable, able to cripple, brimful of anger.

  Odin huddled quietly, aware of the blazing intensity of Pawl as he strode back and forth in the Tower. Pawl was speaking, allowing his words to conjure his thoughts.

  “You guard this planet, don’t you? Keep a watch on the minds who enter here?”

  “I try.”

  “Then how did Laurel die? Who killed her?”

  Odin felt his juices rise in his body like froth and his black gown become active, forcing down his temperature, soaking up his excretion, soothing. Inside him his stone burned.

  “I do not know.” The reply was a yelp and Pawl swung round and faced Odin in surprise. Odin’s voice sounded very different in Pawl’s mind.

  “Hear my reasoning. Find fault if you can. Laurel could not die in the sea. She was almost as at home in the sea as on land. I know. She could have swum to the mainland if she had wanted. Waves held no peril for her, nor the Maw, nor any creatures that move in water. So. Since she could not die in water, she was killed. Someone killed her. Who?” Pawl paused and looked round the room. “Perhaps more important, why?”

  “I do not know.” The voice in Pawl’s mind was strangled and hoarse. Odin could feel his defences slipping. The will to tell the truth was beginning to dry him, and soon he would crack. Little Gerbes. Humble Gerbes. Gerbes not made for greatness. Even the memory of the Tree could not help him; it was as nothing against the roughness of Pawl. Relief came when Pawl’s mood suddenly changed.

  “Am I hard on you, Odin? I do not mean to be. You are the only one I can trust. Just tell me: is it possible, was it possible, that someone could have slipped through your defences? Or could someone already here have been suddenly recruited?”

  “It may be there is a traitor near.” This half truth gave Odin some relief. “Perhaps I was not vigilant enough.”

  “The Families. I have always known. There can be no love where self-interest is concerned and the Families are nothing if not self-interested. It scarcely matters who. They are up there, out there, waiting. Even the Shell-Bogdanovich, who I thought were my friends, could have done this.” Pawl reached and took the mottled hand of one of the Laurels who sat close to him. “I was never fooled. Or perhaps I was fooled for a while. But I could not understand how anyone could get in. Perhaps we were all careless. There was such delight….” His voice trailed away and he stared at blankness. “Such delight. I believed it could last forever. Was there ever such a fool as me in the whole of creation? Let me spell it out for you, Odin. There is no happiness. There can be no happiness. There is only delusion and at the end of the dark tunnel a hurting and then vacancy. If any man talks of hope call him a fool. That is my belief. And I will never make the same mistake again. I am grateful to my teachers, be they the Wong or the Proctor or the midget Felice, and in my turn I will teach them a lesson.”

  The cool voice of Wynn cut across Pawl’s speech. “There is no evidence of deceit of this kind in the vibrations between stars. And I am listening every moment. I would hear something.”

  “You would hear nothing. Deceit like this is not planned. It is the way of life. Cut down the happy man. Kill the intruder. Whichever way you trace the argument you find the same answer. My wife is dead because of what we are. We. The Families. The rulers. And we are what we are because life is so cruel.”

  “There is no talking to you.”

  “And you are a machine. A juggler. You know nothing of love. It is love that makes us human. If you could know love you would be human.”

  “Are you human?”

  “Not now. Not any more.”

  “Then you are less than human.”

  “I am the spirit of Death.”

  The savagery of this thought stunned Odin and for a few moments his consciousness lapsed. When he came to himself again he found he was held by Pawl and Pawl’s strong arms were crushing him.

  “You will not die too, Odin,” said Pawl. “You will live. You are my only friend.” He set Odin carefully down on his basal sucker and Odin lurched and then found adhesion. “Just give me a few more days. I am healing fast. Soon we will act.” He looked over to the communication cell. “And you too will be there, Wynn. So get your consciousness into shape. They say you are a reflection of my mind. Well, grow black leaves.”

  24

  ON SABLE

  Helium was impatient.

  For days he had waited for Pawl to return his call. And now, here he was, calling again. Twice before he had been turned away by Wynn. This could not be an accident.

  Finally the vivante space cleared as the contact was made and the Paxwax locked with the Shell-Bogdanovich.

  Helium stared. “Why, hello Laurel, I hadn’t expected to….” His voice trailed away as he stared.

  Laurel was smiling in her merry way and her hair was muzzed. But she did not move. Her twinkling eyes were devoid of mind. “Is Pawl there?” asked Helium, but the mannikin stared back at him impudently, until Helium, in anger, broke the circuits and ended the call.

  Within minutes he was in contact with Dame Clarissa.

  Being a watchful, cautious creature, he controlled his mood and spoke obliquely.

  “I am glad to see you looking better, Dame Clarissa.” And indeed she was looking better. Her eye was sharper and with a glint of humour. She faced him fully, sitting in the vivid light of the vivante transmitter. Most particularly, though, she was no longer wearing the dark head cover. A fledgling down had begun to cover the raw pink of her scalp. Before too long she would be fully plumose again.

  “Helium Bogdanovich, you have not contacted me to compliment me on my appearance, even though I do not look quite the old crow I was some weeks ago. You have business to discuss. I like business, it gives me purpose. Would you like Jettatura here? She is at work in her gymnasium but she will come instantly if you should….”

  “Jettatura is not needed. I was wondering about the Paxwax … have you had any dealings with them recently?”

  “We do not deal with the Paxwax. We pay tribute. We have ceded valuable sectors close to Elliott’s Pocket, territory we have held since the Great Push. The rest you know. Why do you ask?”

  “Have you any word of them? Do you know anything about them that I should know? Speak clearly, Dame Clarissa.”

  “The Paxwax may visit us at any time. I am told they are happy. The Beltane is expecting a child. That is all I know. It is common enough knowledge, I should think.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “What do you want, Helium? My Homeworld is forfeit. Our sperm banks are sterile. What more would you have? Do not ask me to say I like the Paxwax.” She stared out at him. “We are the children of chance, Helium. On a different day the battle would have gone to us and you would not have found me so kind. But I know nothing of the Paxwax. I do not wish them ill any more than I wish a pestilence on the Proctors … though perhaps that would be no bad thing. Now then, Helium, tell Clarissa what the problem is. Have you and the Paxwax had a fal
ling out? How that would distress me.”

  Helium received her taunting with equanimity. “I have tried to speak to Pawl twice,” he replied. “Both times his Guardian, Wynn, turned me away. Just now I found myself facing a glowing doll, one of those Larksong mannikins. It was made to look like Laurel. I do not understand.”

  “And that brought you knocking at my door? Well, well. The Paxwax is avoiding you. You wonder why. You think I might know. Really, Helium.”

  “It is not unknown for old adversaries to join forces.”

  “No, but in this case they have not. Helium, look at my hands. They are empty. I am tired of lonely intrigue. You do not know how broken the Xerxes are. We have done nothing to set the Paxwax against you. We have given no hints of plans that are afoot. You know that we can keep secrets. Believe me or not. I am an old woman now, but I am not a fool. One day I hope to be great again. I would not set everything at risk just when we were getting along so nicely. What have I to gain?”

  “Revenge.”

  “It is an empty gain. You may discover that.” She looked at him birdlike, with her head on its side. She had never seen Helium so indecisive. “You know, there may be another explanation. It could be that the Paxwax does not trust you. Perhaps he thinks you are involved in some clever tricks. Perhaps he is giving you a warning.”

  “I thought of that. But why Laurel?”

  Clarissa shrugged elegantly. “He is a strange boy. Very wild up here –” she tapped her forehead – “very dangerous. Remember Toby. Perhaps his son is madder than he was. Perhaps….”

  Helium raised his paw and Dame Clarissa fell obediently silent. “Discover what you can. You still have ways. I know that. But I do not want to see any damage caused.”

  “Are you asking me to spy for you?”

  “Yes.”

  The down on Dame Clarissa’s head stirred and fluffed as she inclined her head. Her feathers were attempting to rise.