by Tim Clare
‘Worth waiting for, isn’t it?’ said Alice.
Delphine closed her eyes and listened to the soft crackle of the rain. ‘More.’
They shared the remainder, cleansing their palates with swigs from the canteen. Alice sat with one leg hugged to her chest, the other stretched out in front of her. Rain struck her exposed foot and ankle, sending up a shimmering corona.
They sat, not saying anything. Delphine pressed her palms into crunchy, textured soil. Her skin was tingling. She did not move.
‘What was I like?’ said Alice, at last. ‘At the end?’
‘You don’t remember?’
Alice shrugged.
Delphine sighed. Thin palm fronds trembled with droplets.
‘Surly. Opinionated. Impossible. Easily bribed with chocolate.’
‘Sounds like me.’ She smiled, and Delphine realised that Alice was a stranger to herself. All those hours together were lost now. She felt an ache in her heart.
‘I tried to keep you home. I couldn’t cope. You kept getting confused. You’d tell me off for moving things.’
Alice gazed at the dancing leaves. ‘I don’t remember any of it.’
‘Good.’ Delphine screwed her eyes shut. ‘One day, I heard you howling. I found you on the bathroom floor. You’d run a bath and forgotten to put any cold in. Oh God. Alice, it was horrible. I’m so sorry. I hurt you.’
Delphine felt a hand on her shoulder. ‘You did your best.’
‘My best was shit. That’s the thing, isn’t it? Some people do their best and their best is shit. I don’t want you to absolve me. I want you to promise to look after yourself.’
‘I was dying, wasn’t I? In the end, I mean.’
‘Yes.’
‘So there’s nothing to lose, is there? None of this is real. It’s just a lovely dream.’
Delphine’s belly was a surging mix of hot and cold. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It means it would be silly to waste it.’ Alice’s voice became low, even though there was no one around to hear. ‘I remember life before I got ill.’
The nape of Delphine’s neck tingled. She felt a kiss thickening in the air between them, waiting to be born.
She was afraid. She wanted it so much.
Delphine closed her fingers round a fistful of earth.
She turned and kissed Alice. Alice’s tongue was cool from drinking water. Delphine pushed forward greedily; Alice yielded, tilting her head back. Rain struck the pool with a sound like a thousand birds taking flight. Delphine stroked the nape of Alice’s neck with her fingertips. Alice lay back a little farther. Clumsily, Delphine tried to shuffle closer.
Alice snatched Delphine’s hand from under her and rolled on top of her, shoving her down into the soft leaf litter. Delphine landed on her back with a whump. Alice straddled her and pinned her wrists against the ground, grinning triumphantly, panting. Her damp hair spilled down and brushed Delphine’s cheeks. Delphine felt a knee sliding up between her thighs.
Alice leaned in. Delphine thought she was going for a kiss, but she twisted her head and bit Delphine’s neck. It was a gentle bite, a reprimand, and the sensation spread through Delphine’s body in a warm analgesic rush.
Delphine kicked off her trousers; Alice slipped out of her skirt. Words had left them. Delphine lay pinioned on soft soil, listening to rain crackle against the leaf canopy. She could feel her flesh tingling under Alice’s tongue, the hot press of their ribcages as they breathed, the pull of the tides, the turn of the planet, everything.
After, they bathed in the pool. Delphine washed dirt out of her hair, then she swam under the waterfall and let it pummel her shoulder blades. Silky weeds stroked her ankles. Her whole body was fizzing.
They put the wine fruits into two string sacks and walked back side by side. The rain had stopped. Steam rose from tree roots. Little gem-blue crustaceans scuttled across the sucking mud, digging with spade-shaped pincers. Delphine concentrated on the sensation of fruits against her back. As she breathed, she thought of the blood cycling through her system, feeding oxygen to her muscles – the improbability of it, the stunning preposterousness of life.
When they reached the hillside entrance Butler was waiting.
‘Where the hell have you been?’
Alice held up one of the string sacks. ‘Fruit picking.’
Martha was a short distance away, standing on top of a rock. Her antennae were twitching and her eyes had gone a pale mauve.
‘You all right, dear?’ said Delphine, feeling chewy and light-headed from the climb up the hill.
Martha hopped down from the rock. She took a twig, cleared away some leaves and wrote in the mud.
he was here
The words seemed to pulse with static as Delphine read them. They had depth and texture.
‘Henry?’
Martha bopped her fist twice for yes.
As they descended into the earth, everything was buzzing. The dropping temperature made her arms prickle with gooseflesh. Torchlight swept across tallowy rivers of flowstone, picked out the vapour-dance of each breath. When she stepped onto the foredeck, the grain in the wood of each plank seemed variegated and rich with nuance. Her skull tickled. She had a feeling in her belly like she had swallowed the sun.
Alice brushed her fingers down the back of Delphine’s hair, climbed aboard and went to her bunk. The wine fruits rumbled out of their sack, bright cannonballs.
Butler called from the tiller. ‘You all right, Venner?’
Delphine picked one of the fuzzy pink things, hefting it in her palm, a grenade. ‘Hmm?’
‘Are you coming or aren’t you?’
Delphine looked down and saw she had only put one leg in the boat. It took her a moment to judge the height of the gunwale and lift her other foot over it. Butler cranked the throttle forward. She stumbled as they lurched away from the shore.
‘Right,’ called Butler. ‘Cut up a couple into cubes about an inch square and stick ’em on fishhooks.’
‘What?’ She had to shout over the roar of the engine. The boat turned, fruits rolling in the opposite direction. ‘Hooks?’
‘What in my instructions was even remotely ambiguous? Cut. Them. Up. Small.’ He indicated with pinched thumb and forefinger. ‘Stick. Them. On. Hooks.’
‘Aren’t we going to eat them?’
‘Ha!’ Butler threw his head back; for a moment it looked like his skull had split. ‘No, they’re for bait. You can’t eat them. They’re toxic.’
‘What?’
Butler rotated a forefinger beside his temple. ‘Psychotropic!’
But Delphine barely heard him above the way the boat’s wake smashed lantern light into a thousand golden fishes, above the hot ripe smell of red algae, above the taste of the memory of Alice on top of her, above the blood currents irrigating the branching grikes of her brain.
It was not her first experience with hallucinogens and by the fourth hour she remembered why she generally avoided them. Florid visions surged across the canvas of the water; sometimes she was God, watching the surge of armies from high overhead, choosing who would live or die. Sometimes the boat was a motorbike sidecar, watery tarmac rushing past inches from her nose.
With horrid abruptness, they emerged from the Underkills into greasy amber daylight. On the riverbank, vegetation formed a dense, strangling mat. Sun flared through slatted leaves, hurting her eyes. She thought maybe the jungle was on fire.
The rich, rotten stench of climbing orchids. The slow shifting parallax of the mangroves. Chitter-shrieking birds and insect choruses rose in unison then dropped away with the clinical precision of someone sliding a fader.
At some point, Martha was beside her with a coffee. She held it out for Delphine to take, gnashing her mandibular palps in encouragement. Her segmented red armour shone with condensation. Delphine felt odd, as if she had not seen her for years. Her heart was pierced by a needle of sadness. Sweet Martha. Her pupils were cobalt blue marbles in lakes of cream. She was so bea
utifully normal.
‘Would you mind if I held your hand for a bit?’ said Delphine.
Martha slipped her smooth fingers between Delphine’s. Winged lizards swooped over the water’s skin, their circuit boards glinting like black scales. The trees were whispering. Delphine listened for clues about Henry. Had they seen him? Was Martha right, or just yearning? And Algernon? Had he ever found this place? She put her cup down on the foredeck and rotated it clockwise and counterclockwise, turning the jungle sounds up and down. Messages licked tantalisingly at the edges of her hearing. Gouts of flame leapt from the river.
She looked round and Martha was gone. The mangroves cast long shadows. How much time had passed?
A storm approached from the south – a yellow-grey wall eating the horizon. She braced and felt energy flowing from her clenched fingers into the boat, reinforcing its timbers, sealing its hull. She would protect everyone through force of will. Then the storm was upon them.
The brown river went from sleek muscular curves to spikes. Everywhere a chaos of explosions. Butler spread his wings over his head as an umbrella. Water streamed from the edges. Someone had brought Delphine a plastic poncho. They must have, because she was wearing one, rain rattling against the crackly plastic covering her head. Maybe she had grown it. Maybe she was repelling the rain with her strength of character. She knew she wasn’t, but the thought had a cosiness. Who knew what was possible, really?
Rain hissed on leaves, made a cacophonous drumming on the cabin roof. The din mellowed her thoughts. Warm droplets massaged her skull. She was soaked through. She felt she had been reborn, somehow.
The rain eased, passed. Night fell, and tremendous anvil-shaped clouds appeared in the distance, lightning bolts arcing between them as the sky purpled and congealed. The air took on a coppery flavour. Gangs of iridescent moths flurried low over the river in heart-shaped formations, attracted by the glow of big, papery lotuses with orange and pink petals. The flowers parted in the sampan’s wake, and when she looked back the river was a corridor of lights.
Why had she spent so long hiding? Tainted fruit or not, the world was glorious. Her chest swelled with thanks, a deep aching love for all this fickle transience. Perhaps she finally understood. It made no sense to prefer parts, to pick favourites like Alice or Martha or the warmth of the sun. No single thing could exist without the world that sustained it. Every part was dependent on the parts it touched – the trees recycling the air Alice needed to breathe, rain and dirt sustaining the trees, an intricate conspiracy of ancestors, loves and trysts and accidents funnelling down into her genetic legacy. Food became energy became muscle and skin. Shit and corpses became fertile soil. Everything was constantly arising out of things it was not, and each of those things arose from not-themselves, a cat’s cradle of dependent geneses, cloaked in breathable gases, hurtling through the emptiness of space. I am the boat and also the water. To love one was to love the whole. And goodness, how that knowing hurt.
She laid her head on the foredeck and let the engine’s vibrations penetrate her brain, her teeth. A figure was watching from the bank, bathed in blue light. Ice crystals formed on the gunwale. She closed her eyes and listened as the jungle whispered her name.
CHAPTER 8
THE GREAT WHITE LODGE
(Ten years and two months before inauguration)
It should have been simple. Hagar hid on a narrow plateau overlooking the Prefect’s lodge. Her path was clear.
She did not feel the ice-axe go – her fingers were so numb she only saw the haft slip from her gloved hand, then heard the bang as it struck the slanted slate roof below.
A guard was slouching on the terrace, the heavy hooked iron head of his mammoth goad resting against the flagstones while he smoked a cheroot. He spun round in time to see the ice-axe fall from the lodge’s wide eaves in a dusting of snow. It hit the stone slabs with a clank. He looked up.
Hagar’s plan had been to lower herself onto the roof. She would have shuffled along the slippery ridge tiles to the gambrel end, tied a line round the chimney pot, and descended onto the Prefect’s first-floor balcony. The key to surprise was not speed. It was patience.
Now, she would have to improvise. She tossed her staff aside, pulled off her goggles and leapt the ten feet down onto the roof, her crampons clattering against the tiles. She let herself slide down the roof until her boots hit the steel mesh of the snow guard.
With freezing mountain air scalding her nostrils, she slipped out of her thick musk ox coat, and began scooping snow onto the quilted lining.
‘Qui vive?’ The guard’s challenge had a hesitant note. Perhaps he thought the bang was a mountain civet, or snowmelt from the cliff above, the ice-axe a tool left on the roof by a forgetful worker. All more plausible than the truth.
Hagar unhooked the grapnel from her belt, slotted two of its flukes into the snow guard’s mesh, then paid out about six feet of line. Gripping her stiletto between her teeth, she shoved the coat off the roof and slid after it.
She dropped. Her stomach went up in her throat. She snatched at the rope; high-tensile line skidded through her gloves fast and hot. Her wrists and shoulders jarred.
She was swinging fifteen feet above the terrace. Directly below, the guard was staring down at the coat, a great brown-black splat of fur and exploded snow.
She slid her stiletto from her teeth and dropped.
The guard stepped back.
She stabbed at the space where he’d been standing. The flagstones surged up and she landed hard on the coat, snow blasting out the sleeves.
Her legs buckled. She rolled. The guard backed away, switching the goad to his left hand, drawing a pistol. Behind him, the terrace fell away into a gorge lined with steep, grey-blue cliffs floating in mist. He was taller than he’d looked from above. His greatcoat strained to contain his broad chest, his chestnut-red beard glinting with crystals of frozen breath.
‘Qui vive!’ Definitely a challenge.
Hagar rose slowly, turning her left ankle in on itself, pretending to put weight on it then grimacing as if in pain. She held up her left palm, hoping to distract him from the dagger hidden in her right.
‘Monsieur! Ne tirez pas sur une petite fille! Je suis tombé.’ Which was true. She clutched her breastbone, panting. ‘Ma vie pour le Grand-Duc!’
The guard’s full, fiery brows beetled. Then he spotted the rope.
She thrust the knife into his chest.
With cold hands it was hard to drive the thin blade through the padded layers of his greatcoat, jacket and shirt. He grunted, looked down in dumb wonder. Hagar put the heel of her palm behind the pommel and pushed. She felt the tip grind against a rib.
She saw white flashes, the ground tipped and her cheek hit stone. Her head throbbed. He had clubbed her with the pistol muzzle.
A clatter – her stiletto striking the flagstones. The guard grunted, swore. She tried to rise but the courtyard was turning huge undulating circles. Through watering eyes, she saw him stagger towards her, one hand pressed to the wound, the other lifting the iron goad over his head. Against the cobalt mountain sky, its hooked tip loomed like a question mark, a straight blade rising out of it, an answer.
Her vision straightened. She clambered onto all fours, her head still swimming.
‘S’il vous plaît, monsieur!’ she gasped. ‘Vous avez fait une erreur!’ Who hadn’t? She remembered the words of her second Canoness: Remember, sister – you may not lie, but if your enemies fool themselves through their own ignorance, this is their sin, not yours. Let them presume. Introduce doubt, confusion. One day ambiguity will save your life. ‘Votre père m’a envoyé!’ Which was correct, theologically.
He hesitated, the goad hanging in the air. Hagar barrel-rolled into his shins. He swore, tried to step back. She grabbed a fistful of greatcoat hem, sprang from the ground into a handstand, and mule-kicked him hard in the face with her spiked metal crampons.
She felt her heel connect with his chin, kicked again and again
. The goad clanged to the ground. He grabbed at her knapsack. She kicked and kicked. He cried for her to stop. It sounded as if he had bitten his tongue. The blood was flowing to her head. Wooziness rushed through her. His fingers clutched at her legs. She straightened her back and kicked.
He crumpled; she let herself fall with him. He landed with a great ‘ammph!’ She rolled clear. His arms slapped either side of him.
The lower half of his face was a porridge of maroon and purple. She might have shattered his jaw.
He was groping for his pistol at his hip. During avalanche season it was probably a last resort.
But his shaking fingers were clutching at the leather sling holster and finding it empty, and Hagar was retrieving her faithful musk ox coat which she had bought from a one-eared vesperi trader down in the valley, its insides now wet with snow, shameful really after the fine service it had done her over the past two days, and he was trying to call out but finding his mouth broken and flooded, and she was walking towards him across the courtyard, dragging the damp musk ox pelt like a fresh kill, his one-shot pistol in her fist.
Hagar glanced back at the grand windows of the lodge, then over at the stone archway. The guard was trying to lift himself up, slobbering blood into his beard, steam rising with each shuddering breath.
She raised the pistol, slid her finger through the freezing ring-trigger. Hagar had no martial spirit – she could not fetishise a gun as some instrument of calcified valour – but she appreciated sensible design. The butt was ivory, incised with deep, curving grooves for better grip during cold weather. The ring-trigger was enlarged to accommodate a gloved digit, the breech lever chunky enough to manipulate with numb fingers. The guard was moaning something, over and over. He had pulled himself up onto his elbows and was crawling backwards, towards the low balustrade overlooking the gorge.
She raised the pistol. He shook his head, rolling his eyes back like a martyr. The pitch of his voice rose. She saw the strength draining from his limbs. He could have fought back, even now, but fear was making him drunk. He was anaesthetised by the sublime magnitude of death, had, at some level, chosen it. She could hear the softening in his tone, could hear him growing far away. Their meeting had been providential, thus – as with all God’s intercessions – it was a kindness. Poor boy. Tenderly, she wrapped the thick coat round the pistol.