Then suddenly he performed a series of cartwheels across the throne-room. It was so unexpected that we all lowered halberds or whipped out hand-guns.
“That feels good!’ exclaimed Half-and-Half, coming to a halt.
Sheepishly, we replaced our weapons. Only the Emperor behind his protective field seemed to have remained calm. Leaning forward, as if the better to enjoy the show, he clapped his hands and called out “Encore!”
So then Half-and-Half performed a series of flying somersaults – one, two...
But the third one was different. Half-way through it, he stopped, he became motionless, suspended three feet off the ground. We all gasped – the Emperor, the guards, all of us – as he hung there for five seconds or more. And then, equally abruptly, he darted sideways, from that motionless mid-air position, generating momentum from nowhere. He darted sideways, snatched my weapon from its holster and flung it down at my feet, while he himself landed effortlessly beside me, smiling, without a wobble, without any sign of breathlessness or strain.
“Come on!” he called to the Emperor’s guards. “Attack me with your halberds!”
They hesitated.
“No. Go on. Do your worst. I won’t hurt you.”
The guards glanced up at His Majesty, who nodded, smiling broadly.
Clumsily, feeling afraid and feeling like fools at the same time, the two guards converged on him, their halberds lowered.
“Come on! Run!” shouted Half-and-Half.
They ran.
And suddenly Half-and-Half had vanished. There was only a single golden butterfly hovering in the space where he had been.
The guards clattered to a stop, just in time to prevent themselves from impaling one another. The butterfly flew upwards, upwards, upwards...
...and crashed to the ground, transformed into an enormous fiery lion. It lashed left and right, it roared. As the guards backed away, it struck their halberds from their hands with its great paws and sent them clattering across the floor...
And then Half-and-Half was back again in human form, looking up at the Emperor with a friendly wink. “There!” he said. “You can see I haven’t lost my touch!”
“Indeed!” said His Majesty, laughing. “Indeed! But I also see that my bracelet of annihilation is still securely in place!”
He clapped his hands to bring the audience to a close.
“Very well then, Cardinal-Major. Thank you for your assistance with this. Take this fellow away and get him out of those dreadful breeches and into some sort of decent outfit that will reassure your fellow-officers. He can come to my war cabinet this afternoon. We’re in very serious trouble just now, I’m afraid. Those damned Antinomians are making fools of us all along the Eastern front. I’m losing a lot of territory, not to mention about a thousand soldiers a day. We need some new ideas – and quickly. We need some sort of encouragement.”
A metal screen slid down in front of the throne and the Emperor and his pearly light were gone. I led the Immortal Warrior down the famous Amber Stairs, and across the Court of Roses.
Half-and-Half the traitor was to be accommodated in the House of Honour.
That is politics I suppose.
*
“You see?” he said, as we passed among the roses. “They just won’t accept it, even when I tell it to them straight! Once they see what I can do, they refuse to believe that they’d be just as well off without me.”
We passed down the Corridor of the Succession with its long series of portraits of Emperors and Empresses past. Half-and-Half smiled. “Still,” he said, “I like this Emperor. He’s fun.”
He made no mention of the bracelet and, when I spoke of it, he touched it vaguely with his fingers and moved on to other things. I couldn’t help admiring his sangfroid.
“Tell me,” I asked him, “How did you do those tricks?”
The Immortal Warrior smiled. “Hypnotism, sleight of hand, mirrors, very good balance – take your pick!” He winked at me. “There’s no point at all in my telling you how it really works. You wouldn’t believe me. This is a scientific age after all!”
He laughed. To my own surprise, I found myself smiling.
Half-and-Half looked at me sharply. “There’s quite a pleasant fellow under that stiff exterior, I shouldn’t wonder,” he said after a moment, “quite a good-looking fellow too. Maybe you should think of chucking in this Pristine nonsense and having a bit of fun for a change? After all, you only live once. Unless, of course, you’re me.”
We crossed the Court of Fountains and reached the entrance of the House of Honour. Flunkies came out to greet the Immortal Warrior. My role was at an end. We said goodbye.
“Take a leaf from my book,” said Half-and-Half, “Whatever I do, life will go on the same. So I might as well do whatever I like.”
He smiled. “I won’t say that it always works out for me as a philosophy of living, but half of the time it works out fine.”
I turned to go.
“Do you know what I’ve missed most of all?” I heard him say to the flunkies. “It’s not food, it’s not drink. It’s...”
And then the door closed behind him.
*
My duties completed, I left the Palace and crossed the teeming city. I smelt the city smells of spices and cooked meat and excrement and sweet cakes and rotten vegetables. I heard the angry shouts and the love-songs and the crying babies and the children shrieking and yelling as they played chase through the streets and alleys. I saw the white incense smoke rising from the houses of Enino as they made ready for mid-afternoon prayers. I saw the purple ribbons fluttering in the windows of the whorehouses. I crossed the Great River and looked down at the dirty children and old women and dogs, swarming over its muddy bed, scavenging for scraps...
And I returned to my home, the barracks of the 32nd Pristine Guard. The white walls were bare, the stone courtyard swept scrupulously clean. Officers in white jackets like my own saluted and greeted me with polite deference.
“Pleased to see you, sir.”
“Good to have you back, your Holiness.”
I was suddenly very tired. I couldn’t face eating with my subordinates that night. I asked for some bread and cheese to be brought up to my rooms and let it be known that I would take up the reins again in the morning.
Then I retired to my quarters, my two austere rooms, with the iron bed, and the plain whitewashed walls and the single plain image of Enino, unsmiling, in the midst of his fiery wheel. Dutifully I made an obeisance, then I began to undress.
As I unbuttoned my jacket I caught sight of myself in the little mirror I use for shaving.
Tentatively, uncertainly, I smiled.
I’d never smiled at myself before. It seemed a strange thing to do. But I quite liked it. I sensed the pressure, long suppressed, of a warmer, lighter, more sensual me within...
*
Half-and-Half went to war. In No-Man’s Land he danced among the bullets and laser beams. Among the ruins and the bomb craters, he laughed and performed acrobatic feats. Over the fallen corpses, he became a lion, a giant, an eagle with wings of fire.
Back at headquarters Generals and Arch-Generals stood in awe as he effortlessly absorbed information and expounded stratagems. Our soldiers cheered. They loved him for his indomitable spirit, not caring at all that he had once betrayed their own great-grandfathers. Along the whole front, they went back on the attack, full of courage and hope and new energy.
And all the while the bracelet of annihilation remained securely fixed to the Immortal Warrior’s arm.
Day after day the Antinomians fell back, very often dropping their weapons and running in sheer panic. Day after day, fair-haired Philinomians ran out from their hiding places and prostrated themselves at our feet. At the Battle of the Ford, our enemies were finally routed. Their kingdoms were annexed to the Empire. Our victory was complete.
I was sent by the Emperor to grant Half-and-Half his pardon and to bring him back to the City for the celebrati
ons. But as I drew near to his encampment, a flash of blinding white lit the sky ahead of us. The bracelet had exploded, annihilating Half-and-Half and, with him, hundreds of soldiers and the entire mountain on which he had stood, looking out over those fertile Antinomian plains which he’d added to our Emperor’s realm.
Where the mountain had been there was only a huge crater, almost completely smooth, as if scooped out of butter by a gigantic spoon.
We walked up to the rim of it, Sergeant Tobias and I. It was as bare and as dead and as featureless as a crater on the moon.
“No one could survive that,” Tobias muttered, “no one. Not even an Immortal.”
*
Not long afterwards I left the Imperial service and became a merchant, dealing in military surplus, and making good use of my reputation and my contacts. I married, I became quite comfortably off, I travelled the length and breadth of the Empire making deals.
About fifteen years after the Battle of the Ford, I happened to be passing through the Antinomian Borders with my new assistant Zolinda, and thought I would go up with her and take a look at the crater. (It had filled with rain over the years and become a lake). Partly I was curious: I wanted to remind myself that those strange events had really happened and not just been a dream. Partly I hoped to impress Zolinda with my stories of Half-and-Half and Gendlegap and my place in the history-books. She was an attractive woman and I wanted to sleep with her. It had worked with several others before.
So we went up to the lake known as Half-and-Half’s Doom, Zolinda and I, and I told her the story, looking out over that circular expanse of lifeless water. But when I had finished, I felt strangely flat and not at all impressed by my own importance. What part had I really played after all in the story of Half-and-Half, other than the part of a dupe and a stooge?
That explosion was no accident, whatever the official story. Even as he was instructing me to fetch the Immortal Warrior, the Emperor knew quite well that I would never reach him. He hoped to cheat fate by getting the benefits of Half-and-Half’s service and then eliminating him before the price had to be paid. He was – he still is – a player of games, a chancer, as amoral as Half-and-Half himself. A pure and virginal soldier like me was merely a useful foil.
But still, Zolinda was impressed. “You must be very proud, Illucian,” she said. “I remember my father telling me how Half-and-Half had finally been made to serve the Emperor and win our war! I never dreamed I’d one day work for the man who was sent to fetch him from Gendlegap!”
I shrugged. “Actually I’m not so sure the Emperor did really benefit from Half-and-Half’s service. For one thing our soldiers all loved Half-and-Half and blamed the Emperor for his death. The Emperor lost their wholehearted loyalty and that was the beginning of the end of his power.”
It was cold up there. Above the rocky bowl of Half-and-Half’s Doom, the sky was heavy and grey. Zolinda suddenly put her arm in mine. Why did this give me so little pleasure?
“As for the war,” I said, “we won it, I suppose, but the Antinomians have been winning the peace ever since. Now that they are inside of the Empire, they’re taking over. We even have an Antinomian in charge of the Imperial Bank!”
I turned to go, pulling free of her as I did so. “And of course the Philinomians breed like rabbits,” I said, as we began to climb the rocky slope. “There isn’t a street in the Empire where their pale little children aren’t running about and shouting to one another in that outlandish Inglic tongue.”
“But none of that is anything to do with Half-and-Half!” Zolinda protested.
“You don’t think so?”
I paused to look back at the lake, surrounded by its rim of bare smooth rock.
So much for the Emperor, so much for the Empire, but what had become of me?
Well, I ate well now, I drank well, I made love as often as I could. And I was no longer thin, no longer haunted by the Eninometic ghosts of duty and sacrifice, no longer at war with my ordinary human needs.
Yet there were still times when I missed my old life in the Pristine Guard. Those austerities were once a part of me, after all. They gave me a direction, they provided me with certainties to live by.
And whatever I did, I would never recover those old certainties again.
*
There was a splash. Ripples spread outward from the central point of the lake.
It couldn’t have been a fish. Nothing lived in that perfectly transparent water. Someone must have thrown a stone.
Yet there was no one by the water’s edge, no one at all to be seen but a small dark-haired figure far off at the very top of the opposite rim.
And surely no one could have lobbed a stone from that far. It would have been an astonishing feat of strength.
The concentric waves spread over the glass-like surface until no part of the lake was untouched by the impact of that single stone. But as they spread they became smaller, and soon the lake was blank and smooth once again.
The dark-haired figure seemed to be watching us. Whoever it was, he waved. I could almost imagine I saw a small, teasing smile.
Monsters
“This is Dirk Johns, our leading novelist,” said the poet’s mother, “and this is Lucille, who makes wonderful little landscapes out of clay…”
“Oh, just decorative,” protested the novelist’s tiny, bird-like wife, “purely decorative and nothing more.”
“And this is Angelica Meadows, the painter. You perhaps caught her recent exhibition in the Metropolis, Mr Clancy? I believe it received very good notices.”
“I believe I did hear something…” I lied, shaking hands with a very attractive young woman with lively, merry eyes. “I’m afraid I spend so little time in the Metropolis these days.”
“And this,” went on the poet’s mother, “is the composer, Ulrika Bennett. We expect great things of her.”
No, I thought, looking into Ulrika Bennett’s cavernous eyes, great music will never come from you. You are too intense. You lack the necessary playfulness.
And then there was Ulrika’s husband, ‘the ceramicist’, and then an angry little dramatist, and then a man who uncannily resembled a tortoise, complete with wrinkled neck, bald head and tiny pursed little mouth.
“Well,” I said, “I’m honoured.”
The tortoise was, it seemed, was ‘our foremost conductor and the director of our national conservatory.’
“The honour is ours, Mr Clancy” he said. “We have all read your extraordinary books, even out here.”
*
“William!” called the poet’s mother, “let us lead the way to dinner!”
The poet turned from a conversation with the painter Angelica. He had wonderfully innocent blue eyes, which had the odd quality that, while they seemed terribly naked and vulnerable, they were simultaneously completely opaque.
“Yes, of course, mother.”
He pushed her wheelchair through into the panelled dining room and the guests took their seats. I was given the head of the table. William sat at the opposite end, his mother by his side. Servants brought in the soup.
“William and I are trying hard,” announced the poet’s mother to the whole company, “to persuade Mr Clancy that there is more to our little colony than cattle ranches.”
“Indeed,” I said soothingly, “there is clearly also a thriving cultural life which I would very much like to hear more about.”
Well, they needed no second bidding. Remarkable things were being achieved under the circumstances, I was told, for the arts were struggling by with an appalling lack of support. Apart from the poet’s mother, Lady Henry, who was of course wonderful, there was not a single serious patron of the fine arts to be found in the whole of Flain. Everyone present did their heroic best, of course, but not one of them had achieved the recognition that their talents deserved…
And so on. I had heard it many times before, in many more provincial outposts than I cared to remember. I made my usual sympathetic noises.
> It was as the dessert was being served that I became aware of the poet’s blue eyes upon me.
“Tell me honestly, Mr Clancy,” he asked – and at once his mother was listening intently, as if she feared he would need rescuing from himself – “Had you heard of even one of us here in this room, before you knew you were coming to Flain?”
I hadn’t, honestly, and from what little I had seen of their outmoded and derivative efforts, it was not surprising. (Let us face it, even in the Metropolis, for every hundred who fancy themselves as artists, there is only one who has anything interesting to say. It is just that in the Metropolis, even one per cent is still a good many gifted and interesting people.)
But before I could frame a suitably tactful reply, William’s mother had intervened.
“Really, William, how rude!”
“Rude?” His face was innocence itself. “Was that rude? I do apologise. Then let me ask you another question instead, Mr Clancy. What in particular were you hoping to see on your visit here? Please don’t feel you have to mention our artistic efforts.”
“Well I’m interested in every aspect of course,” I replied. “But I don’t deny that I’d like to learn more about the fire horses.”
There was a noticeable drop of temperature in the room and everyone’s eyes turned to Lady Henry, watching for her reaction.
“Fire horses,” sighed the novelist, Johns. “Of course. The first thing every Metropolitan wants to see. Yet surely you must have them in zoos there?”
I shrugged.
“Of course, but then we have everything in the Metropolis, everything remotely interesting that has ever existed anywhere. I travel to see things in context. And fire horses are Flain to the outside world, the thing which makes Flain unique. It was wonderful when I first disembarked here to see boys with their young fire horses playing in the streets.”
“How I wish the brutes had been wiped out by the first colonists,” said the poet’s mother. “Your curiosity is perfectly understandable, Mr Clancy, but this country will not progress until we are known for something other than one particularly ugly and ferocious animal.”
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