New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  Suddenly, her look darkened. “My mother will kill me if I go back. Seriously, she will. I don’t want to go back.”

  “Maybe you don’t have to,” Brentford reflected. “I can put you up somewhere, just long enough for things to calm down a little.”

  Pirouette looked at him dubiously. He could see her child’s mind trying to think in the long term, but for her the long term, however she looked at it, didn’t seem that long. And why would it be, in that den of iniquity, in that Parisian Babylon? Although Paris was no more Babylon than it was the New Jerusalem. All cities worthy of that name were both: they were one because they were the other, just as New Venice was—or would be. Blankbate may well be right on that account, Brentford mused—and promptly began to worry about the Scavenger’s whereabouts …

  Lost in his thoughts, he had vaguely noticed that Swell-in-the Sack and his lady (probably of the peripatetic persuasion as well) had moved from their table, but he was surprised to find the tall fellow suddenly standing next to his table and talking to Pirouette.

  “Well, well, look who’s here,” he was saying. “The little Pirouette in flesh and bones. Not much of either, though, eh?” He pinched her cheek, but it was her whole face that blushed at the compliment.

  “Good evening, Monsieur,” said Brentford, coldly.

  “Congratulations. You found yourself quite a trump,” the other said, speaking to Pirouette as if Brentford weren’t even there. Swell-in-the-Sack turned to his companion, a buxom brunette with so much makeup on her face that she looked like a painted wooden saint. “Didn’t I tell you, Marie-Honnête, that this child was a phenomenon of intelligence?” He patted Piroutte’s head. “You don’t have your two feet in the same clog, eh? You’re truly your mother’s daughter.”

  “Come on, Saturnin,” the girl said. “Leave them alone. You’re going to be late for the march.”

  “Sure. G’bye to the company,” said Swell-in-the-Sack, with a smug smile that Brentford felt like ripping off his face.

  Eventually, Brentford said to Pirouette, “Maybe it’s getting late,” wondering faintly whether he had kept his calm or simply chickened out. People were streaming into the room, and someone had even started banging on the piano. “Why don’t you come with me? We’ll find space at my hotel, or somewhere else, while your mother returns to her senses.”

  Pirouette nodded and finished her stew with a slurp that was reassuringly childish.

  Brentford was happy to leave the rat-trap of Les Halles, even if the stew had proved excellent. But after the Ange Gabriel, even the damp, cold air felt bracing and healthy. Twenty seconds later, however, it just felt damp and cold, and Brentford hurried south towards the Seine, Pirouette in his wake. Just as they arrived at the Fountain of the Innocents, they came across a long convoy of carts watched over by a detachment of Alpine Hunters, the same kind of troops that Brentford had been seeing patrolling three by three everywhere in the city. Paris, without really admitting it, seemed to be living in a subtle state of exception, and was visibly bracing itself for the worst. The shadowy carts, he noticed, were all filled with vegetables: under the electric glare, the beets, leeks, and onions shone like rubies, emeralds, and gold, and, it seemed, had already become as precious. It was something that he could perfectly relate to as former head of the New Venice Greenhouses, but as an exile in ill-prepared Paris, it rather worried him.

  Continuing south, they passed the black, ominous, secretive monolith that was the St. Jacques Tower, then crossed the frozen Seine. Brentford inhaled the scene: the slithering strip of rubbly ice, the polysyllabic bridges, measured like classical verse, and the jumble of steeples, columns, and chimneys that crushed and folded eras upon one another and pushed them towards the vanishing point where ice stopped and night began. The lights, diffused in the clouds above, shone over the city with the muted glow of a rusty Aurora, and suddenly, with a touch of vertigo, Brentford saw Cabot Canal, New Venice’s Grand Canal, and the palaces that rose along it, with their bas-reliefs and caryatids suddenly made alive by the brush of the rosy lights. The Aurora played on the frozen canal, tinting it with the faintest ghostly hues, as if a rainbow had been trapped under the ice …

  “Monsieur … Monsieur …”

  Brentford shook off the vision and found himself back in Paris, a shiver from New Venice still twisting like ivy round his spine.

  “Sorry,” Brentford said to Pirouette, who, wearing his gloves, which were five sizes too big, held out her hand for him to hold.

  It was only when they arrived on the other side of City Island that they saw the torchlight procession. There were perhaps forty men. The torches in their hands shed a furious, restless light on their long fur overcoats and revealed that they were wearing wolf or dog masks that recalled to Brentford the Egyptian god Anubis. Several of them drew a sledge, on which was mounted, as if on a throne, a white-bearded man in a wheelchair, and on its wheels, Brentford noticed, a spiral had been painted. Behind the throned man, a tall rectangular shape stood upright under a long dark drape. The whole parade was entirely silent, which made it still more awesome.

  The Loups des Bois de Justice, Brentford understood.

  Two sergents de ville, huddled in their cloaks, watched it from the parapet above the Seine. Brentford tried to draw closer.

  “I thought the torchlight processions had been forbidden,” said the first policeman.

  “That goes to show the nerve they’ve got. And right under the Préfecture.”

  Brentford realized with sudden terror that, indeed, he stood just across from the Police Prefectorate, and this while holding the hand of a ragged nine-year-old girl who was obviously not his. He almost expected Tripotte to come out at any minute, with that drippy grin of his, but luckily, all of the policemen were busy trying to make sense of the procession. With the slightly exaggerated gait of someone who wants to prove to the world that his conscience is clean, he briskly took Pirouette across to the other bank, and back towards the Grand Hôtel des Écoles, on the rue Delambre.

  After another stop at a chauffoir on the rue Vaugirard, where paupers huddled to warm themselves at braziers, Brentford and Pirouette finally arrived at the hotel. Entering his suite with Pirouette in tow, Brentford was surprised to find Gabriel, Lilian, Tuluk, and the Colonel all in agitated consultation, while the silent Blankbate, still wearing his joke-shop disguise, remained seated in a corner. Brentford remembered their pact of silence and kept his questions to himself. For the time being, he felt contented enough just to see his flock gathered.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “May I introduce you to Pirouette?”

  The little girl made a comical curtsey to the crowd. As she lifted her eyes, Brentford could see that she had fallen for Lilian immediately.

  “It really is an incredible story …” he started to say, not knowing where to begin the tale of his day.

  Gabriel interrupted him gently.

  “The Seven Sleepers are in Paris, Brentford.”

  To be continued …

  I

  The Vampires of La Villette

  Thomas Paynes-Grey and Blanche de Bramentombes stepped down from the cab and joined the dozens of people waiting in line at the gate of the Villette abattoir. Dawn had just broken somewhere behind a pearl-grey sky, and the morning air felt like a dip in icy water.

  Thomas yawned and stretched.

  “You mean you have to do this every morning?” he asked, vaguely regretting his offer to escort her.

  “Twice a week, on killing days,” she answered. “Or so the doctor says. But it is rare that I have someone to accompany me. You are so kind.” She rested her gloved hand lightly on his good arm.

  Thomas nodded and sighed. He watched the people in the queue, some anaemic, some feverish. They would have been much better off if they had stayed in bed, he thought, rather than standing there shivering on the wide, wind-blown avenue that led to the slaughterhouse. Behind the gates, a platoon of Republican foot guards, or cipaux, as Blanche cal
led them, were watching the place as if it were the Bank of France, scrupulously checking the little medals that the Villette workers carried on their blouses before letting them in. With the oncoming winter, this might well become a more important place than any bank in the country, Thomas reflected.

  Blanche’s hand gripped Thomas’s suddenly, and then immediately relaxed. She smiled through her veil, but looked nervous and worried.

  “Something wrong?” he asked.

  “No. Nothing. It’s just the cold.”

  He left it at that, but eventually catching one of her glances he turned in the same direction, and suddenly saw—was that Blankbate, standing on the opposite sidewalk, with a scruffy old bum at his side?

  “Don’t look,” Blanche hissed.

  “I know that man,” Thomas said. “Excuse me a moment.”

  “Hello!” he called, striding across the avenue to shake hands with Blankbate. “What are you doing here?”

  Blankbate pointed his false beard towards the old man, who was watching Thomas with a look that was both fearful and angry.

  “Helping someone,” Blankbate said curtly.

  “Nice to meet you,” Thomas answered good-naturedly, extending his hand to the man, who looked at it with a curious blend of shyness and disdain.

  “I’m trying to be discreet,” Blankbate said between clenched teeth.

  “Oh! Ah! Sorry,” Thomas said. “Then good day to you, gentlemen.” But Blankbate whispered to him before he could retreat, “Careful with that girl.”

  Thomas smiled. “Oh, it’s worse than you can even imagine,” he answered, before moving on. Still, it was the second time he had been warned about Blanche, and it was starting to worry him more than a little. He found her in an atrocious mood when he returned.

  “Do you know that old man?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t,” she said coldly. “Let’s go. They’re opening the gates.”

  Thomas said nothing, but felt miffed. After he had gotten up in the middle of the night, undergone the torture of cab transportation through impassable streets, and frozen his family jewels—as the French tastefully refer to them—in that no-man’s-land at the other end of Paris, well, perhaps he deserved a little more kindness.

  With minimal fuss from the cipaux, the queue eventually entered the City of Blood through the wrought-iron gate, crossed a wide snow-covered esplanade where stood a lonely clock, and swerved towards the walled slaughter yard. A long row of wooden doors under a glass and iron roof, it was filled with blaring moos of terror and the stench of panic dung.

  A brigade of five or six butchers was waiting there, watching the women from the queue with hungry looks that were sometimes returned, and commenting on them in a strange language nobody understood, Blanche excepted.

  “It’s louchebem,” she explained, “The Butcher-Boys’ lingo.”

  A baladeur brought a red heifer to the gate, and the butchers, ignoring her trembling struggle, attached her halter to a ring on the ground. Thomas could see that they turned the slaughter into a spectacle of pitiless but careful craftsmanship, perhaps less out of respect for the victim than out of the pride they felt in their trade.

  A Herculean man wearing an apron and carrying a spiked sledgehammer that Blanche called a “merlin” stepped up and quickly swung his godlike weapon. They heard a dull crunch as it struck the skull; the cow fell to her knees with a dejected moo that sounded like a sigh. Almost instantly, one of the boys plunged a poignard into her backbone and the patron-boucher deftly slit her throat from end to end. As the blood spurted onto the greasy, dirty floor, Blanche clenched Thomas’s arm with such strength that he could feel her nails digging into his flesh.

  One of the Butcher-Boys had put a pan under the throbbing gash and collected the blood. In a moment, the “blood-drinkers” began to produce their glasses and cups and hand them to the boy, who filled them and gave them back. Blanche took out of her purse an ornate pewter tumbler carved with her initials, explaining to Thomas that it was a present from her first communion, handed it to the boy, and got it back full of thick, frothy blood. Fascinated, Thomas watched Blanche lift her veil and drink from her tumbler. She noticed his stare, and her gory lips blew him a kiss. “You should try it,” she said, adding playfully, “It’s very good for men.”

  “Thank you. I won’t need it with you,” Thomas answered, with his best boorish gallantry.

  By and by, the satiated queue disbanded. Blanche lingered a little while, ogling the scene, trembling, as the butchers started to eviscerate the dead animal. She even exchanged a few garbled words with a tall, well-built, hook-nosed fellow, who called her “Lanche-bluche.” Thomas observed him with jealous zeal, as the man went on to whisper something to the patron-boucher, before leaving him with a curious sign of the hand, a zero or circle traced with index finger and thumb.

  “We should be heading back,” Thomas said sombrely. The whole morning, and his strange meeting with Blankbate, had left him ill at ease; nothing that a good shot of morphine wouldn’t fix, though.

  “Hmm … Yes … You’ll take me home, of course?” Blanche asked with an inviting smile as she let down her veil.

  II

  New Venice Revisited

  That morning, Brentford had remained at the hotel. Sitting at his desk wrapped in a quilt, he scribbled and sketched in his pink and blue notebooks, jotting down his memories of New Venice, drawing a few buildings, and carefully notating his dreams, because he had realized that they were more vivid than his recollections. The Colonel, on the table, twisted his neck to read what Brentford was writing (“Me, glasses? That would be the last straw!”) and commented freely. These were usually Brentford’s favourite mornings, and today, with the news that the Seven Sleepers, or at least one of them, might be in town, thrills of excitement ran through his pen, and the pale ghosts of New Venice rose around the room with more substance than usual.

  Well into the previous night, the Seven had spoken about New Venice, and Brentford had noticed how little they all knew—himself included—about its foundation. It was one of the Sleepers’ most eccentric claims that the city had been built with the help of “supernatural powers”—including stone levitation by Tibetan monks—and, accordingly, the few historical facts surrounding the construction were laced with legends, most of them conflicting, as yesterday’s conversation had shown. The chronology of these events was the most difficult thing to reconstruct and, thanks to the Sleepers’ intemperate tampering with calendars, nearly impossible to correlate precisely with historical time outside New Venice. If the Sleepers had wanted to make the city as mythical as possible, they had been remarkably successful.

  Likewise, an oath of secrecy had been enforced among the first generation of the Two Hundred and Ten Hyperboreans who had “built” and run the fledgling city. The two arcticocratic scions among the Most Serene Seven, Duke Brentford Orsini and Earl Gabriel d’Allier, remembered the oratorical precautions their fathers had used in telling foggy anecdotes about the foundation, and how they had laughed off their own tales afterwards, always insisting that they were probably legend. Brentford’s and Gabriel’s respective Transpherences had done little to enlighten them, for their fathers—who had lost their own fathers before Transpherence was perfected—had been told the same stories, and their memories remained for their sons fleeting and dim, like half-forgotten dreams. All that could be inferred from these few glimpses was that the city had been born fully formed and had not changed much, insulated from time as it was.

  Here, the Colonel’s presence became a treasure for Brentford. He had been around for a long time, had actually been one of the Two Hundred and Ten as Baron Branwell, and of course he was now the last of them. His memories had remained relatively intact (perhaps, Brentford thought, because they were from a nearer future) and he was only too happy to tell the story of his coming to New Venice.

  “I was not involved in the first stages of the construction,” he told Brentford now, “though I arrived early
enough to see it before it was finished. It was built in less than ten years, which, given the conditions, was rather amazing.”

  “And when was that?”

  “In 1902 A.D., I think. But given the different calendars, one lost track rather quickly.”

  “How did you find yourself there?”

  “It’s a long story. I was serving as a captain in the Second Dragoons, the Queen’s Bays, you know, in India and then in Egypt, until 1897—which means I’m not likely to meet my double, like that poor Dr. Lavis—and then in the Second Boer War. I’ll spare you the details, but I was wounded, discharged, and given a job in the War Office when I returned to England. I quickly got bored, but then one night I met a woman named Lucy, and got into, shall we say, an intimate relationship with her. It quickly struck me that she seemed to know a lot about me, and by and by, she revealed to me that she was an Ice Nymph.”

  “A what?” Brentford asked.

  “Ah, the Ice Nymphs, young man … half-courtesans and half-spies, all beautiful, and well versed in the ways of the flesh. They travelled the whole wide world on behalf of the Polaris Guild to press-gang disaffected young men into going to New Venice. They were very persuasive, believe me. Once you had been chosen, it was more than bad form to refuse—it was also, or so they hinted, a bad idea. If you rejected the offer, your memory of it would have to be erased. They had hairpins that were long and poisonous, and could leave permanent damage in your spine: a life-long palsy that would leave you control only of your eyelids. You would become, in their own term, a snowman.

  “But mostly they presented the city in a way that made it desirable, see? You discovered that you had always wanted to go there and start anew. And the money was good, too, except that it came from their own mint and couldn’t be spent outside New Venice. Of course, they could have told us all that beforehand. But I’m getting ahead of myself here …