The Promise of the Child

by Tom Toner

  “Yes, I like the fragrance,” Elcholtzia replied, tilting his narrow head so that his voice would carry to the kitchen. “My mother used to claim inhaling smoke was bad for the liver—what nonsense.”

  Lycaste sat on some stained and ancient-looking cushions in a bright circle of sunlight that fell across the floor, shifting further back as the old man looked at him.

  “Now then,” Elcholtzia said to him, “what’s this I hear about you and Pentas?”

  Lycaste’s colour drained.

  “Don’t go white.” Elcholtzia wheezed a laugh, waving a hand dismissively. “I’ve heard it all from Eranthis anyway.”

  Impatiens returned with steaming ceramic bowls of tea on a tin tray, placing them in the sunny spot with a rattle. “You must see that you hire servants in the new year, Ez, I can’t be making things and carrying all the time.” He looked between them. “What are you saying to poor Lycaste? Don’t interrogate him—he’s shy enough as it is.”

  “And he’ll remain shy unless he’s trained not to be. You cosset him, Impatiens.”

  Lycaste took a bowl, burning his hand and wishing he were somewhere else.

  Impatiens sat down, shaking his head. “I’m his friend, not his mother.”

  “Someone should write to that dear, maligned lady and send her an invitation,” said Elcholtzia. “I’d very much like to meet whatever produced Lycaste here. Are your parents as good-looking as you, Lycaste?”

  He put the tea down, fingers smarting. “They’re handsome enough.”

  Elcholtzia studied him. “I daresay not as much as you. Another suitor arrived here not long ago. Wanted to know which house was yours.”

  Lycaste rubbed his burned skin and looked up. He’d received no visitors this summer.

  “I sent her the other way, towards Izmirean. She’s probably still walking, poor thing.”

  “Attractive?” Impatiens asked.

  “Not classically. She was very insistent. Told me she’d heard about our Lycaste from the usual source, those damned Players.”

  Impatiens tried to drink his tea, gasping at the temperature. “From which Province?”

  “Sixth.”

  He pointed at Lycaste. “That reminds me—Lycaste says he’s seen someone new about.”

  “I wasn’t sure,” muttered Lycaste. “I told you that.”

  Elcholtzia examined him again. “What did you see?”

  “Like I said to Impatiens, it could have been one of us, just far away.” The make-believe had endured for far too long. Lycaste didn’t think he had the creativity to stand up to further questioning.

  Elcholtzia frowned. “That would be the likely explanation.”

  “A person could hide in the Province and we’d never see them,” suggested Impatiens. “Easily.”

  “So there might be someone around?” asked Lycaste cautiously, not meeting Elcholtzia’s eye.

  “Exactly what did you see?”

  Lycaste had no choice but to own up. “I didn’t actually see anything.”

  “You told me you saw someone,” said Impatiens, exasperated.

  “I felt stupid. It was more of a feeling. Like someone was watching me.”

  Impatiens threw his hands up in despair.

  “I didn’t ask you to mention it.”

  “Shush, Impatiens,” said Elcholtzia softly. “People see things from time to time. Things they can’t explain.”

  “Like who?”

  “Musa claims he met a dwarf up Mount Gebiz. Abies saw it, too.”

  “A dwarf?” Impatiens smiled. “You mean a little person? It was probably only that bore Jotroffe.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that. But Ipheon saw someone last year, too, or thought he did. A yellow gentleman, strolling in his garden. Nobody he knew. He went in to fetch his daughter, thinking they had company, but when he came out the man was gone.”

  “Do you believe in ghosts, Elcholtzia?” Lycaste asked, speaking before he’d had time to review his words.

  “You’re thinking of Pentas’s stories?” Elcholtzia sighed. “Superstition. Ghosts are of no more danger to you than the smoke in my hearth.”

  “What if there was someone?” said Impatiens, blowing on the mist rising from his tea.

  “Someone deliberately hiding from us? Why would they do that?”

  “Any number of reasons. He could be a robber, a thief, someone out to snatch maidens.”

  Elcholtzia set his mouth. “We don’t get those sorts of people down here.” He directed a bony finger at Lycaste. “It’s the boy’s imagination.”

  “Indulge me.”

  “Hypothetically, then, the person may very well be lost. He or she might have come far, possibly en route from the port to Kipris or another island. It’s possible they would be frightened of us, not knowing what we’re like or how we’d be inclined to treat strangers.” Elcholtzia finished his bowl of tea, pouring another from the pot without delay. “But that’s conjecture. The actors don’t come back this way until Atu-minter, so we’ll hear about visitors on the roads then.”

  “What if he didn’t take the road?” Impatiens asked. “There are plenty of other ways through the Menyanthes.”

  “Everyone takes the road.”

  “Maybe they don’t want to get in anyone’s way or trouble us for hospitality,” suggested Lycaste. Someone lost in the wilderness could survive indefinitely in any Province; travellers were just as likely to gain weight in the hot coastal lands, where food drooped from every branch.

  “Then they’re not lost, and we need not trouble ourselves.”

  “How about a sign?”

  Elcholtzia’s orange face turned to Lycaste.

  “We put up a message somewhere.”

  “Saying what?” Impatiens asked, a smile forming.

  “I don’t know.”

  “There’s nobody here, Lycaste.” Elcholtzia stirred and got to his feet, all dangling, wasted nakedness beneath the wiry grey hair of his belly. He went to the pantry, clearly wishing an end to the debate.

  “You’d have to write the message in every language,” said Impatiens. “If there’s a lost traveller roaming the forest and peeking in at us at night, he won’t speak Tenth, or probably Ninth or Eighth, will he?”

  Lycaste hadn’t thought of that. When Pentas first arrived from the Seventh, far to the north-east, her muddled grasp of their language—in essence the twin of her own, featuring only minor alterations in grammar and spelling—had indicated once again how impossibly intricate the grand voice of the world was, that the smallest change might require years of extra practice. Eranthis’s own Seventh-tinged accent still sounded faintly ridiculous, and she’d lived with them far longer. The moulding pressure of countless, unknown millennia had gifted Melius-kind a library of nearly three hundred precisely attenuated words for every noun or adjective. Writers of fiction could craft subtler images than any master painter, the range of tools at their disposal wider and finer. Lycaste, more briefly educated even than Pentas, knew only a fraction of his own immeasurably expressive tongue, and smaller still was his command of the ruling dialect, the language of the First, which his father had struggled for years to teach him in the hope that Lycaste would one day make something of himself. Though he spoke a global language, someone three Provinces away would have to work very hard to understand him, and First, the speech of power, sounded like lyrical drunken rambling in comparison.

  “The sign would have to be enormous, or we’d need to make plenty next to each other,” continued Impatiens. “Are you going to do that?”

  “Forget I said anything.” Lycaste was growing tired of the ridicule and wanted to leave. The light had slanted to a rich ellipse since they arrived, mellowing the reflected colour in the smoky room. He’d missed his afternoon nap.

  Impatiens stretched to make sure Elcholtzia wasn’t about to return to the withdrawing room. “Look here, do you think I should tell him about our little venture or not?”

  Lycaste didn’t care. As far
as he was concerned, Elcholtzia could take his place on the boat. “Why are you asking me?”

  “He might object.”

  “And if he does?”

  “I suppose you’re right. He’s not my father, just as I am most certainly not your mother.”

  Lycaste shook his head, watching a butterfly that had alighted on the curved windowsill. It flexed its trembling wings in the afternoon sun, casting a sharp, translucent bow-tie shadow. With each fragile movement, patterns on the wings changed colour, like their own skins. The tips, green and dazzlingly leopard-spotted, flashed scintillating blue, while tawny strips of orange closer to the creature’s body became sweeps of violet.

  “If you’re debating whether to tell me about the shark, you’re wasting your time,” came the old man’s voice from the pantry, interspersed with the clink and clatter of dishes. “Eranthis visited me this morning and told me all about it.”

  Impatiens clenched his teeth, shaking his head. “And what do you think?”

  Elcholtzia arrived carrying a jug and saucer, placed them next to the bowls with a sigh. He shook his head.

  Impatiens waited. “That’s it?”

  Elcholtzia noticed the butterfly still sitting on the windowsill and looked sadly at it. “I never told you about poor Sabal, then?”

  “Who was that?” asked Impatiens, his eyes suddenly widening. “The woman who was eaten?”

  Elcholtzia looked down at his big gnarled hands, rubbing them together at last. “We were friends, she and I. At one point I was even intended for her—my great-aunt’s wishes.” He appeared to remember something and turned to Lycaste. “It was your Uncle Trollius who really loved her, though, Lycaste.”

  “Trollius?” said Lycaste, surprised. “I can’t imagine him loving anybody.”

  “He never told her, but I think she knew.”

  They both fell silent.

  “So what happened?” Impatiens asked eagerly.

  Elcholtzia looked at him, irritation wrinkling his narrow face. “Well, one morning she went out swimming and simply never returned. A whole day had gone by before anyone noticed she was missing.”

  “How do you know she didn’t drown?” Lycaste asked him.

  Some time passed before the grizzled old man replied, glancing occasionally at the butterfly on the window ledge.

  “We found her head, Lycaste. That’s how. It washed up on the shore not far from your orchard.”

  The butterfly vanished in a glittering flash.

  Lycaste could see it in his mind’s eye, dark and small and far away, lying canted in the sand. You wouldn’t have known what it was at first, not until you were almost upon it, the green tide slipping between your toes as you bent to see.

  “You were friends with my uncle, weren’t you?” he asked Elcholtzia, after a period of silence.

  “Great friends.”

  “I can’t imagine him falling in love.”

  “You mustn’t have known him well. He was a hopeless romantic. After Sabal’s death, Trollius never walked on his beach again, and it piled up with driftwood and flotsam. It’s good to see you caring for such a beautiful place—I had feared, when I first met you, that it would be neglected.”

  Again he was a child, summoned, if not for a reprimand, then a lecture. “Thank the birds. They do all the work.”

  “Yes, they’re a valuable commodity these days. I am surprised your mother didn’t have them sent back to Kipris Isle. There was nothing in Trollius’s wishes concerning them.”

  Lycaste had also received a copy of the wishes but never read them. He wondered now why Elcholtzia had, and what he might have received.

  “He would be pleased with you, Lycaste,” the old man continued. “Many of your rejected suitors come back this way and comment on the pleasant aspect of your house and land, even if the master’s hosting skills leave something to be desired.”

  “I don’t ask for people to visit,” said Lycaste, affronted. “Why should they be disappointed when I turn them down? I just want some peace and quiet.”

  Elcholtzia snorted a laugh. “Don’t worry, Lycaste. Your looks shall fade one day, as mine have, and they’ll stop coming. Then you’ll have your wish. In the meantime, spare a thought for those less fortunate than you.”

  “I don’t see how you’re less fortunate,” mumbled Lycaste sulkily.

  “Is it really loneliness you crave? You are free to have some of mine, could I but give it away.”

  Lycaste looked at the man, unable to think of what to say.

  Elcholtzia leaned forwards, his voice soft. “This business with Pentas—it happens to all young men at some point. You are lucky to have such little experience in the matter. Think on that.”

  “Has she spoken to you?”

  “Oh, yes. She’s very shy, of course, but I know how to speak to her, make her feel at ease.”

  “She’s told you everything?”

  “Most of it. The unfortunate business with the Mediary that resulted in her coming here.”

  “She should have gone to a Plenipotentiary,” Lycaste grumbled, “brought that man to justice.”

  “Sometimes it’s not as simple as that, Lycaste. Justice is not so easy to come by these days.”

  “I would have protected her.”

  Elcholtzia smiled warmly at Lycaste for the first time. “I don’t doubt that.”

  *

  Lycaste walked back along the hill road they’d circumvented that morning, Impatiens as usual staying a while longer with Elcholtzia. Not for the first time, it crossed his mind that the old man, though only just beginning the third stage of his life, might be dying.

  A solitary cloud drifted far out at sea, exactly obscuring the low sun so that its outline blazed. He watched it as he walked, not wanting to miss the moment when the corona reappeared. A tiny, unique eclipse, just for him. The thought made him look around again, lengthening his stride down the hill, but the scrubby, stunted palms on either side were empty.

  The air was crisp, cooler than the previous night and carrying the musky perfumes of the orchard. His single cloud had long since gone when he reached his home, replaced by the slow kindling of a handful of weak stars in the dense blue. Lycaste saw the wavering light in his third tower; a fire must have been lit in the central grate of the round chamber. That was his place; the helper birds knew not to go up there. Tiredly climbing the spiral stairs while he composed a reprimand, Lycaste found he could smell her, lighter, sweeter, intermingled with the coarse veil of woodsmoke that hung to greet him.

  Iro

  Sotiris’s feet lead him treacherously back to the port. A half-hour walk at least, but he’s there in an instant, just in time to see the men disembark from the boat. One of them has a car waiting and gets in without waving goodbye. It moves quickly away from the curb into the empty midday street, carrying a scent of baked rubber. Sotiris lets his gaze follow the dwindling vehicle, a battered, antique solar Citroën that twinkles in the sun, wondering where it’s going in such a hurry. He looks back to see his sister Iro taking the skipper’s hand as she walks along the wobbly gangplank. He smiles, a broad grin that might just stretch his face in two, knowing that for some reason, in some long-lost where-and-when that eludes him, he has missed her very much. Perhaps he has been on the island a long time, but that doesn’t feel quite like the truth.

  Iro, wearing an elegant red summer dress from some London high-street label, sees him, her smile faltering as she glances back at the boat. She has brought a guest. Sotiris continues to watch her, feeling as if he hasn’t seen her in a lifetime. At last he looks to the boat. A tall, slightly stooped man is being helped from the ferry, one long leg steadying itself on the slimy stone. He is clothed in Amaranthine style but the drapery is opaque, dark swathes that the light never touches. Sotiris stares, not realising that the two had ever met.

  Maneker smiles at him. His old friend looks as he always has, gaunt-cheeked and long-featured, handsome like a well-bred whippet. His skin is coppery, the s
un gleaming from the tip of his nose. The traitor Amaranthine grabs him in an embrace, and Sotiris looks over Maneker’s shoulder at his sister once more, pleased simply that she has found the time to visit. Something nags his mind, the memory of a presence he felt sure was on that boat. He looks back, but the boat is empty now, all the passengers departed.

  He takes Maneker to his chapel. He’s not sure why—it wouldn’t be his first choice—but it’s merely the place where he becomes aware. They both sit looking out at Kefalonia, hazy in the morning air, their legs dangling over the warm rock wall.

  “I was sorry to hear about Iro.”

  Sotiris nods, sure for a moment that he has just seen her. He looks back to the view, the thousands of deaths registering from somewhere, somewhen. “They tell me she did not suffer.”

  “Still.”

  He looks briefly at Maneker’s profile, then back at the large island in the distance. “Your timing was good.”

  “Was it?”

  “Sending Stone to escort me out …”

  Maneker lets the sentence hang there for a while. “Are you grateful?” he asks at last, swinging his long legs.

  “Yes.”

  “Enough to wish to repay me in some way?”

  Sotiris knows what Maneker wants. He feels his body stir somewhere beyond where they are, all around them, as if the sea and sky and islands are all contained within a racing molecule deep inside himself.

  “You want my cooperation.”

  “Only what I’d ask from a friend.”

  He nods. “Then of course.”

  Maneker grins and drapes an arm around Sotiris’s shoulders. “All is well, then.” His smile falters. “As well as can be, anyway. You must go to your sister, mourn her.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then come and be with us in the First—what do you say?”

  He watches the man waiting for the ferry, their farewells completed amid a small crowd of impassive island commuters. All of it is a construct of his mind, he has no doubt, but still Sotiris watches Maneker. The man who used to be his friend stands patiently, not talking to anyone, thin hands stuffed into unseen pockets. The ferry is a ponderous white smear churning the harbour water as it turns, ready to disgorge arriving Kefalonia traffic.