Kitabı oku: «Weaveworld», sayfa 3
Every inch of the carpet was worked with motifs. Even the border brimmed with designs, all subtly different from their neighbours. The effect was not over-busy; every detail was clear to Cal’s feasting eyes. In one place a dozen motifs congregated as if banded together; in another, they stood apart like rival siblings. Some kept their station along the border; others spilled into the main field, as if eager to join the teeming throng there.
In the field itself ribbons of colour described arabesques across a background of sultry browns and greens, forms that were pure abstraction – bright jottings from some wild man’s diary – jostling with stylized flora and fauna. But this complexity paled beside the centre piece of the carpet: a huge medallion, its colours as various as a summer garden, into which a hundred subtle geometries had been cunningly woven, so that the eye could read each pattern as flower or theorem, order or turmoil, and find each choice echoed somewhere in the grand design.
He saw all of this in one prodigious glance. In his second the vision laid before him began to change.
From the corner of his eye he registered that the rest of the world – the yard, and the men who’d occupied it, the houses, the wall he’d been toppling from – all were winking out of existence. Suddenly he was hanging in the air, the carpet vaster by the moment beneath him, its glorious configurations filling his head.
The design was shifting, he saw. The knots were restless, trembling to slip themselves, and the colours seemed to be merging into each other, new forms springing from this marriage of dyes.
Implausible as it seemed, the carpet was coming to life.
A landscape – or rather a confusion of landscapes thrown together in fabulous disarray – was emerging from the warp and the weft. Was that not a mountain he could see below him, pressing its head up through a cloud of colour?; and was that not a river?; and could he not hear its roar as it fell in white water torrents into a shadowed gorge?
There was a world below him.
And he was suddenly a bird, a wingless bird hovering for a breathless instant on a balmy, sweet-scented wind, sole witness to the miracle sleeping below.
There was more to claim his eye with every thump of his heart.
A lake, with myriad islands dotting its placid waters like breaching whales. A dappled quilt of fields, their grasses and grains swept by the same tides of air that kept him aloft. Velvet woodland creeping up the sleek flank of a hill, on whose pinnacle a watchtower perched, sun and cloud-shadow drifting across its white walls.
There were other signs of habitation too, though nothing of the people themselves. A cluster of dwellings hugging a river bend; several houses beetling along the edge of a cliff, tempting gravity. And a town too, laid out in a city-planner’s nightmare, half its streets hopelessly serpentine, the other half cul-de-sacs.
The same casual indifference to organization was evident everywhere, he saw. Zones temperate and intemperate, fruitful and barren were thrown together in defiance of all laws geological or climatic, as if by a God whose taste was for contradiction.
How fine it would be to walk there, he thought, with so much variety pressed into so little space, not knowing whether turning the next corner would bring ice or fire. Such complexity was beyond the wit of a cartographer. To be there, in that world, would be to live a perpetual adventure.
And at the centre of this burgeoning province, perhaps the most awesome sight of all. A mass of slate-coloured cloud, the innards of which were in perpetual, spiralling motion. The sight reminded him of the birds wheeling above the house in Rue Street – an echo of this greater wheel.
At the thought of them, and the place he’d left behind, he heard their voices – and in that moment the wind that had swept up from the world below, keeping him aloft, faltered.
He felt the horror in his stomach first, and then his bowels: he was going to fall.
The tumult of the birds grew louder, crowing their delight at his descent. He, the usurper of their element; he, who had snatched a glimpse of a miracle, would now be dashed to death upon it.
He started to yell, but the speed of his fall stole the cry from his tongue. The air roared in his ears and tore at his hair. He tried to spread his arms to slow his descent but the attempt instead threw him head over heels, and over again, until he no longer knew earth from sky. There was some mercy in this, he dimly thought. At least he’d be blind to death’s proximity. Just tumbling and tumbling until –
– the world went out.
He fell through a darkness unrelieved by stars, the birds still loud in his ears, and hit the ground, hard.
It hurt, and went on hurting, which struck him as odd. Oblivion, he’d always assumed, would be a painless condition. And soundless too. But there were voices.
‘Say something …’ one of them demanded, ‘… if it’s only goodbye.’
There was laughter now.
He opened his eyes a hair’s breadth. The sun was blindingly bright, until Gideon’s bulk eclipsed it.
‘Have you broken anything?’ the man wanted to know.
Cal opened his eyes a fraction wider.
‘Say something, man.’
He raised his head a few inches, and looked about him. He was lying in the yard, on the carpet.
‘What happened?’
‘You fell off the wall,’ said Shane.
‘Must have missed your footing,’ Gideon suggested.
‘Fell,’ Cal said, pulling himself up into a sitting position. He felt nauseous.
‘Don’t think you’ve done much damage,’ said Gideon. ‘A few scrapes, that’s all.’
Cal looked down at himself, verifying the man’s remark. He’d taken skin off his right arm from wrist to elbow, and there was tenderness down his body where he’d hit the ground, but there were no sharp pains. The only real harm was to his dignity, and that was seldom fatal.
He got to his feet, wincing, eyes to the ground. The weave was playing dumb. There was no tell-tale tremor in the rows of knots, no sign that hidden heights and depths were about to make themselves known. Nor was there any sign from the others that they’d seen anything miraculous. To all intents and purposes the carpet beneath his feet was simply that: a carpet.
He hobbled towards the yard gate, offering a muttered thanks to Gideon. As he stepped out into the alley, Bazo said:
‘Yer bird flew off.’
Cal gave a small shrug and went on his way.
What had he just experienced? An hallucination, brought on by too much sun or too little breakfast? If so, it had been startlingly real. He looked up at the birds, still circling overhead. They sensed something untoward here too; that was why they’d gathered. Either that, or they and he were sharing the same delusion.
All, in sum, that he could be certain of was his bruising. That, and the fact that though he was standing no more than two miles from his father’s house, in the city in which he’d spent his entire life, he felt as homesick as a lost child.
IV
CONTACT
s Immacolata crossed the width of heat-raddled pavement between the steps of the hotel and the shaded interior of Shadwell’s Mercedes, she suddenly let out a cry. Her hand went to her head, the sunglasses she always wore in the Kingdom’s public places falling from her face.
Shadwell was swiftly out of the car, and opening the door, but his passenger shook her head.
‘Too bright,’ she murmured, and stumbled back through the swing-doors into the vestibule of the hotel. It was deserted. Shadwell came in swift pursuit, to find Immacolata standing as far from the door as her legs would carry her. The wraith-sisters were guarding her – their presences distressing the stale air – but he couldn’t prevent himself from snatching the opportunity, in the guise of legitimate concern, to reach and touch the woman. Such contact was anathema to her, and a joy to him made more potent because she forbade it. He was obliged therefore to exploit any occasion when he might pass such contact off as accidental.
The ghosts chilled his skin with their disapproval, but Immacolata was quite able to protect her inviolability. She turned, her eyes raging at his presumption. He immediately removed his hand from her arm, his fingers tingling. He would count the minutes until he had a private moment in which to put them to his lips.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was concerned.’
A voice intervened. The receptionist had emerged from his room, a copy of Sporting Life in hand.
‘Can I be of help?’ he offered.
‘No, no …’ said Shadwell.
The receptionist’s eyes were not on him, however, but on Immacolata.
‘Touch of heat stroke, is it?’ he said.
‘Maybe,’ said Shadwell. Immacolata had moved to the bottom of the stairs, out of the receptionist’s enquiring gaze. ‘Thank you for your concern –’
The receptionist made a face, and returned to his armchair. Shadwell went to Immacolata. She had found the shadows; or the shadows had found her.
‘What happened?’ he said. ‘Was it just the sun?’
She didn’t look at him, but she deigned to speak.
‘I felt the Fugue …’ she said, so softly he had to hold his breath to catch her words ‘… then something else.’
He waited for further news from her, but none came. Then, as he was about to break the silence, she said:
‘At the back of my throat …’ She swallowed, as if to dislodge some remembered bitterness ‘… the Scourge …’
The Scourge? Had he heard her correctly?
Either Immacolata sensed his doubt, or shared it, for she said:
‘It was there, Shadwell.’
and when she spoke even her extraordinary self-control couldn’t quite tame the flutter in her voice.
‘Surely you’re mistaken.’
She made a tiny shake of her head.
‘It’s dead and gone,’ he said.
Her face could have been chiselled from stone. Only her lips moved, and he longed for them, despite the thoughts they shaped.
‘A power like that doesn’t die.’ she said. ‘It can’t ever die. It sleeps. It waits.’
‘What for? Why?’
‘Till the Fugue wakes, maybe,’ she said.
Her eyes had lost their gold; become silvery. Motes of the menstruum, turning like dust in a sun-beam, dropped from her lashes and evaporated inches from his face. He’d never seen her like this before, so close to exposing her feelings. The spectacle of her vulnerability aroused him beyond words. His prick was so hard it ached. She was apparently dead to his arousal however; or else chose to ignore it. The Magdalene, the blind sister, was not so indifferent. She, Shadwell knew, had an appetite for what a man might spill, and horrid purposes to put it to. Even now he saw her form coagulating in a recess in the wall, one hunger from scalp to sole.
‘I saw a wilderness,’ Immacolata said, calling Shadwell’s attention from the Magdalene’s advances. ‘Bright sun. Terrible sun. The emptiest place on earth.’
‘And that’s where the Scourge is now?’
She nodded. ‘It’s sleeping. I think … it’s forgotten itself.’
‘It’ll stay that way, then, won’t it?’ Shadwell replied. ‘Who the hell’s going to wake it?’
His words failed to convince even himself.
‘Look –’ he said, ‘– we’ll find the Fugue and sell it before the Scourge can so much as roll over. We haven’t come so far to stop now.’
Immacolata said nothing. Her eyes were still fixed on that nowhere she’d sighted, or tasted – or both – minutes earlier.
Only very dimly did Shadwell comprehend what forces were at work here. Finally, he was only a Cuckoo – a human being – and that limited his vision; for which fact, as now, he was sometimes grateful.
One thing he did comprehend: the Fugue trailed legends. In the years of their search he’d heard it reported so many ways, from cradle-song to death-bed confession, and he’d long ago given up attempting to sort fact from fiction. All that mattered was that the many and the mighty longed for that place, spoke of it in their prayers, without knowing – most of them – that it was real; or had been. And what a profit he would turn when he had that dream on the block; there had never been a sale its like, or ever would be again. They could not give up now. Not for fear of something lost in time and sleep.
‘It knows. Shadwell,’ Immacolata said. ‘Even in its sleep, it knows.’
Had he had the words to persuade her from her fear she would have been contemptuous of them. Instead, he played the pragmatist.
‘The sooner we find the carpet and dispose of it the happier we’ll all be,’ he said.
The response seemed to stir her from the wilderness.
‘Maybe in a while,’ she replied, her eyes flickering towards him for the first time since they’d stepped off the street. ‘Maybe then we’ll go looking.’
All sign of the menstruum had abruptly vanished. The moment of doubt had passed, and the old certainty was back. She would pursue the Fugue to the end, he knew, as they had always planned. No rumour – even of the Scourge – would deflect her from her malice.
‘We may lose the trail if we don’t hurry.’
‘I doubt that,’ she said. ‘We’ll wait. Until the heat dies down.’
Ah, so this was to be his punishment for that ill-considered touch. It was his heat she made mocking reference to, not that of the city outside. He would be obliged to wait her pleasure, as he had waited before, and bear his stripes in silence. Not just because she alone could track the Fugue by the rhythm of its woven life, but because to wait another hour in her company, bathing in the scent of her breath, was an agony he would gladly endure.
For him it was a ritual of crime and punishment which would keep him hard for the rest of the day.
For her, the power his desire lent her remained a diverting curiosity. Furnaces, after all, grew cold if left unstoked. Even stars went out after a millennium. But the lust of Cuckoos, like so much else about that species, defied all the rules. The less it was fed, the hotter it became.
V
BEFORE THE DARK
1
n all, Suzanna had probably met her maternal grandmother less than a dozen times. Even as a child, before she’d fully understood the words, she’d been taught that the old woman was not to be trusted, though she could not remember ever hearing a reason offered as to why. The mud had stuck however. Though in her early adulthood – she was now 24 – she had learned to view her parents’ prejudices with a critical eye, and come to suspect that whatever their anxiety regarding her grandmother it was likely to be perfectly irrational – she could nevertheless not entirely forget the mythology that had grown up around Mimi Laschenski.
The very name was a stumbling block. To the ear of a child it sounded more like a faery-tale curse than a name. And indeed there had been much about the woman that supported such a fiction. Suzanna remembered Mimi as being small, with skin that was always slightly jaundiced, her black hair (which with hindsight, was probably dyed) drawn back tightly from a face which she doubted capable of a smile. Perhaps Mimi had reason for grief. Her first husband, who had been some sort of circus performer, had disappeared before the Great War; run away, the family gossip went, because Mimi was such a harridan. The second husband, Suzanna’s grandfather, had died of lung cancer in his early forties; smoked himself to death. Since then the old woman had lived in increasingly eccentric isolation, alienated from her children and grand-children alike, in a house in Liverpool; a house to which – at Mimi’s enigmatic request – Suzanna was about to pay a long-delayed visit.
As she drove North she turned over her memories of Mimi, and of that house. She recalled it being substantially larger than her parents’ place in Bristol had been; and darker. A house that had not been painted since before the Flood, a stale house; a house in mourning. And the more she remembered, the gloomier she became.
In the private story-book of her head this trip back to Mimi’s was a return to the mire of childhood; a reminder not of blissful, careless years, but of an anxious, blinkered state from which adulthood had liberated her. And Liverpool had been that state’s metropolis; a city of perpetual dusk, where the air smelt of cold smoke and a colder river. When she thought of it she was a child again, and frightened of dreams.
Of course she’d shrugged off those fears years ago. Here she was, at the wheel of her car, perfect mistress of herself, driving in the fast lane with the sun on her face. What hold could those old anxieties have over her now? Yet as she drove she found herself drawing to her keepsakes from her present life, like talismans to keep that city at bay.
She thought of the studio she’d left behind in London, and the pots she’d left to be glazed and fired when – in just a little while – she got back. She remembered Finnegan, and the flirtatious dinner she’d had with him two nights ago. She thought of her friends, robust and articulate people, any of a dozen of whom she’d trust her life and sanity to. With so much clarity to arm her, she could surely re-tread the paths of her childhood and remain untainted. She travelled a broader, brighter highway now.
Yet the memories were still potent.
Some, like her picturing of Mimi and the house, were images she’d recalled before. One in particular, however, emerged from some hidden niche in her head, unvisited since the day she’d sealed it up there.
The episode didn’t come, as many had, piece by piece. It flashed before her all at once, in astonishing particularity –
She was six. They were in Mimi’s house, she and her mother, and it was November – wasn’t it always? – drear and cold. They’d come on one of their rare visits to Gran’ma, a duty which father had always been spared.
She saw Mimi now, sitting in an armchair near to a fire that barely warmed the soot in the grate. Her face – soured and sad to the brink of tragedy – was pale with powder, the brows meticulously plucked, the eyes glittering even in the dour light through the lace curtains.
She spoke; and her soft syllables drowned out the din of the motorway.
‘Suzanna …’
Addressed from the past, she listened.
‘… I’ve something for you.’
The child’s heart had fallen from its place, and thumped around in her belly.
‘Say thank you. Suzie.’ her mother chided.
The child did as she was told.
‘It’s upstairs.’ Mimi said, ‘in my bedroom. You can go and get it for yourself, can’t you? It’s all wrapped up, at the bottom of the tall-boy.’
‘Go on. Suzie.’
She felt her mother’s hand on her arm, pushing her away towards the door.
‘Hurry up now.’
She glanced at her mother, then back at Mimi. There was no mercy to be had from either: they would have her up those stairs, and no protest would mellow them. She left the room, and went to the bottom of the stairs. They were a mountain-face before her; and the darkness at the summit a terror she tried not to contemplate. In any other house she would not have been so fearful. But this was Mimi’s house; Mimi’s darkness.
She climbed, her hand clinging to the bannister, certain that something terrible awaited her on every stair. But she reached the top without being devoured, and crossed the landing to her grandmother’s bedroom.
The drapes were barely parted: what little light fell between was the colour of old stone. A clock ticked on the mantelpiece, at a quarter the speed of her pulse. On the wall above the clock, gazing down the length of the head-high bed was an oval portrait photograph of a man in a suit that was buttoned up to the neck. And to the left of the mantelpiece, across a carpet that killed her footsteps, was the tall-boy, twice her size and more.
She went to it quickly, determined – now that she was in the room – to do the deed and be out before the ticking had its way with her and slowed her heart ’til it stopped.
Reaching up, she turned the chilly handle. The door opened a little. From inside bloomed the smell of moth-balls, shoe-leather and lavender water. Ignoring the gowns that hung in the shadows she plunged her hand amongst the boxes and tissue paper at the bottom of the tall-boy, hoping to chance upon the present.
In her haste, she pushed the door wide – and something wild-eyed lurched out of the darkness towards her. She screamed. It mocked her, screaming back in her face. Then she was running towards the door, tripping on the carpet in her flight, before hurtling downstairs. Her mother was in the hallway –
‘What is it, Suzie?
There were no words to tell. Instead she threw herself into her mother’s arms – though, as ever, there was that moment when they seemed to hesitate before choosing to hold her – and sobbed that she wanted to go home. Nor would she be placated, even after Mimi had gone upstairs and returned saying something about the mirror in the tall-boy door.
They’d left the house soon after that, and, as far as she could now recall, Suzanna had never since entered Mimi’s bedroom. As for the gift, it had not been mentioned again.
That was the bare bones of the memory, but there was much else – perfumes; sounds; nuances of light – that fleshed those bones. The incident, once exhumed, had more authority than events both more recent and ostensibly more significant. She could not now conjure – nor would ever, she suspected – the face of the boy to whom she’d given her virginity, but she could remember the smell from Mimi’s tall-boy as though it were still in her lungs.
Memory was so strange.
And stranger still, the letter, at the beck of which she was making this journey.
It was the first missive she’d received from her grandmother for over a decade. That fact alone would have been sufficient to have her foresake the studio and come. But the message itself, spindly scrawlings on an air-mail paper page, had lent her further speed. She’d left London as soon as the summons had arrived, as if she’d known and loved the woman who’d written it for half a hundred years.
Suzanna, it had begun. Not Dear nor Dearest. Simply:
Suzanna,
Forgive my scribbles. I’m sick at the moment. I feel weak some hours, and not so weak others. Who knows how I’ll feel tomorrow?
That’s why I’m writing to you now, Suzanna, because I’m afraid of what may happen.
Will you come to see me, at the house? We have very much to say to each other, I think. Things I didn’t want to say, but now I have to.
None of this will make much sense to you. I know, but I can’t be plain, not in a letter. There are good reasons.
Please come. Things are different to the way I thought they’d be. We can talk, the way we should have talked many years ago.
My love to you, Suzanna.
Mimi.
The letter was like a midsummer lake. Its surface placid, but beneath?; such darkness. Things are different to the way I thought they’d be. Mimi had written. What did she mean? That life was over too soon, and her sunlit youth had contained no clue as to how bitter mortality would be?
The letter had been delayed, through the vagaries of the postal service, by over a week. When, upon getting it, she’d rung Mimi’s house she’d received only the number disconnected tone. Leaving the pots she was making unfinished, she had packed a bag and driven North.
