The Promise of the Child

by Tom Toner

  Callistemon stayed standing at the water’s edge, practising with the boy; Briza watched him throw, copying the Plenipotentiary’s movements and quickly looking to see where the man’s stone fell. They all saw a pebble strike the water at an angle, bouncing across the low tide three or four times. The boy jumped up and down on the rocks in delight.

  “Briza likes him,” said Eranthis to her sister.

  “He’s showing off,” mumbled Lycaste.

  Pentas sighed. “He’s teaching him.”

  Eranthis smiled and waved as the two looked back. “And so good with children; such a rare quality in young men these days.”

  Lycaste looked up from his attempts to make a comfortable groove in the pebbles. “Aren’t I good with him?”

  “Sometimes, when you’re not telling him off for touching your dolls.”

  “And you’re not young like Callistemon,” added Pentas.

  “I’m only a few years older. We don’t even know how old he is, anyway.”

  “He’s twenty-six,” Eranthis said. “He told me the other day.”

  They both looked at her. She smiled a secretive smile.

  Lycaste turned his attention back to the Plenipotentiary and the boy. All of them were growing fond of the man, even if Lycaste had trouble stomaching it. He was interesting and new, and even Lycaste noticed himself listening carefully to whatever Callistemon said when they all sat down to increasingly grand suppers together.

  The previous evening, their visitor had told them each their flower—the Latish genus after which they were named. Lycaste already knew his was an orchid, his smaller name being Cruenta, but had no idea what the species looked like. Callistemon described the dapper yellow plant and its cinnamon scent for him, explaining that Lycaste cruenta were cultivated in the First, along with every other seed in the world. Each one of the people present, he said, had their namesake growing in the great gardens there. Callistemon explained how, through people’s names, a careful observer might understand much about the state of the world and its inhabitants, their movements and history. Particular names were tied firmly to their own geography until a strong enough wind blew, swirling them to coalesce here and there across new Provinces and take root like wild seeds, only to be cast again into the wind. He returned often to the idea that Eranthis and Pentas shared a common link with the Second, the First’s noble cousin Province, going so far as to formally invite the two sisters to visit him at his family home sometime in the future, at the pleasure of their guardians back in the Seventh, of course, and handing them both a tasselled slip of paper—their formal introduction passports to the Second—should they wish to join him on his return journey. Impatiens and Lycaste had exchanged worried glances as the girls compared the papers excitedly.

  The Plenipotentiary had visited every estate in the Tenth during the eight days since his arrival, apparently satisfied with his findings. Callistemon’s record books came with him to most events, since he would often remember to ask something when a topic was brought up in conversation, jotting down notes as people explained things to him. His enquiries encompassed a range of subjects: lineage and locations of family members; personal dimensions, weight and diet (for which he relied on a complex table of variables in order to calculate his answers—the units of the Tenth differed greatly from those closer to the centre); mastery of complex grammar and a spectrum of aptitude tests, which were supplied on a set of reprintable metal sheets. His meagre luggage, stowed somewhere in Impatiens’s house, might contain a personal diary or something similar, but the work he showed them was nearly always numerical tables or spreadsheets. Callistemon’s last wish—to meet Jotroffe—remained unfulfilled, however. Impatiens had asked at all the hilltop houses and even the port with no success, and there was no pattern to the strange man’s wanderings that anyone could make out.

  The previous night, Lycaste had taken out his maps of the greater continent, bringing them to his rooms so that none of the helpers would see. Old and careworn and untrustworthy, their rubbed engravings tentatively charted the geometric edges of each Province as they whirled like a spiral stair from the capital, somewhere—though the map did not extend that far—high above the crown of the great Black Sea. Lycaste traced the distance with outstretched fingers, dabbing his prints on the polished bronze plates, trying to see for himself the journey Callistemon would have made eastwards across the continent towards the Nostrum Sea and the Tenth Province. A journey of at least eleven hundred miles. So very far, just to count them.

  Callistemon wandered up to them with Briza at his side. “I didn’t see Impatiens last night. Did he stay with the old man?”

  “Yes,” said Eranthis. “Elcholtzia gets lonely up there.”

  “I can imagine.” He kicked at some pebbles with a foot, Briza copying, while Lycaste and the women looked up at him. “Are they a pair?” he asked eventually.

  “A pair?”

  “A couple.”

  Lycaste had expected the question would come soon enough. They’d all been subjected to the most intimate of enquiries in the printed tests, and any sections left blank were returned to the culprit—albeit apologetically—to be completed. Impatiens had lied to Callistemon at the time, straying past the margins of the sheet to invent a broken heart, an exceptionally beautiful woman and a fictional island, but the Plenipotentiary must have seen through it.

  “Is that not done in the First?” Eranthis asked their guest, disappointment tingeing her voice.

  Callistemon played idly with some pastel-blue pebbles he’d picked up, their surfaces swirled with paler tendrils of colour. “That? No, that is not done.” He laughed, tapping the stones together in his hands, perhaps trying to find the foreign words. They chinked like porcelain.

  “Men never fall in love with other men?” asked Pentas.

  Callistemon looked almost bashful, sitting down among them. “Of course not.”

  Lycaste shifted his feet out of the shade and into the sun to make space while Eranthis shook her head, looking at her sister and then back at the Plenipotentiary. “Does it matter whom he loves?”

  The man didn’t reply at first, his eyes running over Briza at his side. The boy wasn’t showing the slightest interest in what was being said, preferring to busy himself with a few ants that had ventured out of the sparse jungle behind them and onto the hot stones. They scurried nimbly towards his outstretched fingers and up his hand, but were shaken off each time before they could reach his elbow. Some of the insects fell onto Pentas’s leg and she brushed at them irritably.

  “I do not believe,” he began at last, “that a man can love another man. It’s a perversion, a vice attributed to love so that it may be excused by someone as … caring as yourself, Eranthis.” He looked at her tenderly. “Do not be taken in by such fraud—you’re too clever for that.”

  “Am I really?” she asked in an apparently carefree tone. “Well, it’s nice of you to say.”

  Lycaste squirmed uncomfortably between them, thinking he might take Pentas for a walk and let them thrash it out. Before he could speak, the Plenipotentiary took Eranthis’s hand.

  “I’m sorry. Let’s not talk of this any more, please?”

  Eranthis shrugged, the hot sea breeze fluttering her hair across her face. “Impatiens isn’t going to be punished?”

  “I’ve not come here to enforce laws.”

  “So a law has been broken?” asked Pentas worriedly.

  He shrugged, apparently embarrassed.

  “Tell me, Callistemon,” Eranthis asked, rising, “are your views shared by everyone in the First and Second?”

  Callistemon rose, too, loosing sand onto Lycaste. He struggled for a few moments with his answer, finally clamping his mouth shut. “Come, let’s not talk of this any more,” he said at last, pointing at the outcrop of cliffs that bookended the cove. “I’d very much like to see the next bay, if you’d show me.”

  Eranthis collected her book from the pebbles and looped it around her wrist, clearl
y unsatisfied. The iron ring with its brace of engraved plates would have been untouchably hot had it not been lying in the shade of the tree. “It’s much the same as this one,” she said.

  “The sand isn’t so fine,” murmured Lycaste, mildly affronted.

  “How are the laws maintained?” Eranthis continued as they began to walk on ahead, her voice still tense with irritation. “Plenipotentiaries are the First’s representatives, are they not? But they only visit every few years—during the intervening time we’re stuck with Mediaries.”

  Pentas glanced at Eranthis sharply.

  Callistemon appeared confused, though clearly relieved that their debate had moved on to a different subject. “You’ve had some experience petitioning a Plenipotentiary?”

  Lycaste looked for Pentas and saw her walking away across the beach to stand in the shallows. Her head was tilted downwards, as if she was fascinated with the tide as it raced away between her toes.

  “Yes, well …” Eranthis glanced about, finally following Lycaste’s stare. Her voice dropped as she watched Pentas. “My sister has. We don’t talk of it much.”

  “And someone came?”

  “No, nobody ever came. The man who attacked her was an Intermediary.”

  “Attacked her?”

  All three studied Pentas for a moment as she waded, her back to them.

  Lycaste wanted to hold her hand again, as if holding any part of her would make her feel better, but since Callistemon had arrived there was never much of an opportunity. The Plenipotentiary was somehow always in the background, lingering at any gathering or wherever the two women were present. Few things mortified Lycaste more than public affection—conducting any sort of romance while there were people in the room was out of the question—and so he had decided to bide his time, growing ever more frustrated. He told himself that soon, once Callistemon had concluded his affairs, he would have her to himself again.

  Excusing himself, he went to Pentas, standing stiffly at her side to watch the retreating waves.

  She looked back, sloshing some water against her legs, removing the last of the dry sand still sticking to her calves. “She wants Callistemon to do it,” she said quietly. “That’s why she’s flirting.”

  “Do what?”

  “To go back to the Seventh and find the man.”

  “The man who …?”

  “Yes.”

  Lycaste looked at her. “Do you think he can?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They rejoined Eranthis and the Plenipotentiary as they walked towards the outcrop, Briza running behind. Callistemon reached down and picked the boy up, hoisting him squealing atop his shoulders.

  Eranthis pointed at the risen moon beyond the cliffs. “What about up there?”

  Callistemon looked, swinging the boy’s legs. “The Greenmoon?”

  “Do your laws apply up there?”

  “Of course not,” grumbled Lycaste.

  Callistemon’s gaze remain fixed on the faint body. “It is as Lycaste says—they do as they wish.”

  “So perhaps, up in the Greenmoon, all the men love other men,” said Eranthis with a smile.

  The relief was clear in his chuckle. “I am reliably informed that they do not.”

  “What kind of men are they, up there?” Pentas wondered aloud. “Are they really trapped, unable to come down?”

  “They made that choice a long time ago,” Callistemon said.

  The four of them waded up to their knees in the jade water that met the crumbling edge of the cliff, skirting the wall of rock that sank steeply into the shallows. They had to tread carefully; the chunks of sunken stone were caked with spiny black urchins, their barbs long enough to breach the water in bristling clusters every few metres. Lycaste gripped tightly to the rock, not worried about the creatures near his sliding feet, his attention instead on the open bay beyond, soft swells bending his view of the sea floor.

  “So it’s bad to step on these?” called Callistemon as he clung to the rock. The next cove lay unseen across the dazzling water, obscured by the first of the cliffs.

  “The spines would go right through your toe,” said Eranthis, treading cautiously.

  Callistemon lifted his foot clear of the water. “I’ll swim, I think.” He climbed up on the steep ledge to make his dive, checking carefully that his legs were clear of the black needles before looking down at them. “Am I swimming by myself?”

  “I suppose it’s only a few feet.” Eranthis leaned away from the rock face to see Lycaste and Pentas. “What do you think?”

  “You must be joking,” Lycaste muttered, slipping in the water and quickly checking his feet.

  Eranthis edged around the rock to Callistemon’s side as he prepared to jump. “What are the people like up there, on the Greenmoon? I suppose they’re very different?”

  Callistemon stretched his arms out to dive. “A whole different species, Eranthis.” He jumped, Eranthis diving after him.

  Lycaste clung to the rock, watching the water anxiously until they surfaced, laughing and pushing the hair out of their eyes.

  He saw Pentas studying them with a strange intensity, unable to think of anything to say to her. She jumped and disappeared beneath the waves, resurfacing and paddling to the others. The three trod water, splashing each other and spitting out mouthfuls as the waves slapped their faces. Lycaste took a big breath as his heart fluttered. The sea beneath them looked very dark and very deep, but he had to follow. He closed his eyes and let go.

  The terror hit instantly as he plunged beneath the surface, a cool black mouth closing around his tightly shut eyes. He forced his eyes open and struggled upwards, gasping in the light as his head met air. He looked about, at first thinking he was in the sea on his own, but Callistemon and the girls had only swum a little further out. Lycaste watched them, casting quick glances down into the water. He couldn’t do it. The fear was almost immobilising; even the rocks he’d jumped from looked too far away to swim back to. He spluttered and swam towards them, climbing free of the water with a shuddering whimper that he was glad none of them could hear.

  After a while, Callistemon swam over, looking up patiently at Lycaste as he sat on the rock ledge waiting for them.

  “Scary?”

  Lycaste picked at a blister on his foot, pretending he hadn’t noticed the man approach.

  “You can go home if you want, Lycaste,” Callistemon said, bobbing closer and dropping his voice. “I don’t think anybody will miss you.” The man was rubbing a reddish welt under one nostril that Lycaste didn’t think he’d noticed before. Callistemon examined his hand when it came away, looking at some blood on his finger. “Go on,” he said, smiling and wiping his nose with the back of his forearm, “run back to your doll’s house.”

  He sat at home and waited. He’d tried reading, but he was a slow reader and needed all his wits about him to begin to concentrate on a passage. He sensed that working on his palace wouldn’t make him feel any better, either, and besides he wanted to stay near the door in case Pentas returned. Occasionally his green eyes wandered gloomily over to her large painting, hanging on the kitchen wall above the long wooden dining table. The scene, of Lycaste’s orchard, was expressive rather than strictly realistic, and he wasn’t sure he liked it as much as her others. The trees were suggested with quick strokes against sweeps of glossy blue and green, their multicoloured fruit jangling vividly against the simple background. Elcholtzia had told him the painting complemented the white room beautifully, and Lycaste was proud to show it off whenever people came by. In the corner of the picture, so subtle that you had to tilt your head so the light caught it just right, was a fingerprint pressed into the paint while it had dried. Her signature.

  A new Quarter came and went. Perhaps the next day had arrived already. He scrubbed the ancient bathtub that sat grandly in his cavernous steam-chamber, the gritty stains on its cracked marble surface refusing, as ever, to budge. Such an odious job deserved a drink, and he plucked a few fat be
rries from his kitchen wall, eating one, then two, then three more. He was halfway through his seventh berry when the bell at the door tinkled and he raced to the window on unsteady feet.

  “You were away a long time,” he said, closing the door behind her softly.

  Pentas turned to him. “Are you drunk? You look flushed.”

  He pressed a hand to his face self-consciously as she went to sit at the table. Some food was still laid out, though Lycaste hadn’t eaten a thing. Now she was here he thought perhaps he could.

  She started tipping things onto one plate with the intention of clearing the table. Lycaste went and sat opposite, taking her hand.

  “Can’t we start again, from the beginning? Tonight?”

  Pentas pushed at something sticky with a long knife, eventually separating it from the patterned ceramic. He could see that she thought it was the drink talking and wished he’d spent more time composing what he was going to say. She gave up on the plates and looked at him at last.

  “I was hoping you’d be asleep.”

  “I could never have slept until I’d seen you properly,” he said, wondering at the bravado of drunkenness.

  She shrugged and looked into the darkness outside. “It would have made things easier.”

  Lycaste picked up the knife and chiselled at the edges of the caked-on substance non-committally.

  “Don’t go,” he said suddenly. “Draw me. Please.”

  “Now?”

  “Now. I was looking at your painting today—it’s the most wonderful thing I own.” He could hear his own voice slurring, the words taking their time to reach her, like someone attempting to walk on a swaying ship.

  “It’s late, Lycaste. You’ll fall asleep while I’m drawing you.”