Prospero's Children Page 29

  “Here?”

  “Only out of politeness. In a street search, it’s considered insulting to overlook anywhere. The captain was suitably respectful. He turned over a few shadows, swatted a barfly, apologized to the management in the same breath. He has some bad habits he wouldn’t want his colonel to hear about.” Ipthor grinned nastily. “But then, so has the colonel, only his are more expensive.”

  “Will they come back?”

  “Né. They know we know you—they know we know they know—but they won’t push their luck. Nor should you.” His gaze slid briefly toward Fern. “I said the nympheline would get you into the morrh-dhuu if she could.”

  “Different girl,” Rafarl said shortly.

  “Prolific, aren’t you?”

  “Leave it. Ipo, we need to get out, lie low for a while—”

  “So I see.” Ipthor chewed thoughtfully on something which might have been tobacco. “The Norne is at her mooring right now and my uncle will be drunk for at least a week. How about piracy on the high seas? You’ve always said that’s what you wanted. And there’s a dozen of us ready to follow you.”

  “No.” Fern heard, rather than saw, Rafarl’s grimace. “I can’t go for good.”

  “Your mother?”

  “Mind your own business.”

  “Too many women in your life, if you ask me,” Ipthor opined.

  “I didn’t.”

  “So what have you got in mind?”

  “Somewhere. What I need is to leave the city—now. Quickly and very quietly. There’s blood money on offer and plenty who don’t object to the stain on their hands. Even here. You know that.” Ipthor gave a grunt which might have been assent. “It has to be the secret way. Tonight.”

  “It’ll cost you.”

  Rafarl produced a small leather pouch and tipped a coil of dull glitter onto the table. Fern opened her mouth to comment and closed it again without speaking.

  “Your mother’s jewels. Well, well. Did you pinch this or did she give it to you?” Rafarl didn’t answer. “And what makes you so sure you can trust me?”

  “I’m not,” he retorted, scooping up the necklace and replacing it in the pouch. “Payment on delivery. Lose me, you lose your fee.”

  Ipthor spat out his tobacco and laughed.

  They left the city via the sewerage system, through a darkness smelling of feces and rustling with rats. Fern had sufficient experience of cities to be accustomed to such odors, but still she shrank from the putrid water that licked at her feet. There was nothing she could do about her clothes. Already she could feel her gauze trousers growing clammy around the ankles from splashback. This, too, is the fairest of cities, she thought. The bowels of Atlantis. And suddenly she felt she was beginning to understand it: a gilded powerhouse ruling an empire of the despised, and the mentality of a people who believed instinctively in their own superiority. Here, all the ugliness was below ground, hidden away in tunnels and catacombs. Out of sight, out of scent. The sewers, the dungeons, the torture chambers. The stainless streets and shining domes sprouted on top of this noisome labyrinth like roses on a dung heap. Let the mainlanders wallow like animals in their filth, the Gifted people were made of finer clay; they had lifted themselves far above their own excrement. But it’s still there, thought Fern. Atlanteans are no different from other men. We all shit: it’s the great common denominator. And if you ignore it then the shit will accumulate and accumulate, until the whole world is defiled. Vaguely she detected in the attitude of Atlantis the beginnings of a deadly trend, but how it would evolve or where it might lead she could not remember, though she thought she ought to know.

  “You’re lagging,” said Rafarl, looking back. “Try to keep up.”

  Ipthor’s torch flickered and smoked some way ahead. Fern ran a few steps to catch up with them and almost lost her footing when something wriggled from beneath her shoe and vanished into the slime. There were other things in the murky stream which did not wriggle, drifting sluggishly or wedged on an unseen snag, things with matted remnants of fur or peeling scales, invariably gnawed and incomplete. On some a trace of blood still showed dimly red. The passage gradually widened and the noxious flow grew correspondingly swifter and deeper: floating objects were now carried past them instead of being left behind. Once, Fern saw a jagged ridge, several feet in length, just breaking the surface, and somewhere in front of it a pair of eyes that stood out of the water all by themselves. “Keep well to the side!” said Rafarl. Ipthor quickened his pace.

  Fern had no idea how long the journey lasted. Eventually they halted at the bottom of a vertical shaft soaring upward into utter blackness. A ladder-like system of grooves was cut into the rock, with metal spikes, rust-smeared, alternating on either side. Ipthor slotted his torch into a wall-bracket. “You’ll have to do without light,” he said. “I need both hands.” He removed his shoes and began to climb; Fern, at Rafarl’s instigation, followed him, her sandals hung by their straps around her neck. She did not ask the height of the shaft or how long it would take. As she gripped the first spike her fingers looked very puny, her arms surely too slight to sustain her bodyweight for more than a few minutes. She hugged the rock wall, clinging on with her toes, concentrating on achieving a rhythm of progress. She felt Rafarl move up close behind her, so close that once, when she flagged, a supporting hand was pressed into the small of her back. The torchlight dwindled below them into a circle of sooty orange, shrinking slowly to the diameter of a coin, thankfully obscured by their intervening limbs. Ahead—well ahead by now—Ipthor scrambled up the rock-face like a lizard; she could not see him but she could hear his rapid movements, the occasional gasp or oath as he stubbed a toe. Now and then he dislodged a loose chipping that bounced off her scalp or shoulder. With the sounds of his ascent gradually receding above her and the light retreating below she succumbed to the illusion that she was suspended in a limbo of darkness, always climbing, always still, going nowhere. It reminded her of some incident in the very recent past—an endless stair, dream-like archways, walls and pillars insubstantial as vapor—but although the memory seemed so near and so vivid that she was sure it must be important, she could not quite catch hold of it. She was desperately grateful for the proximity of Rafarl, encouraging her without words, impelling her on by his very presence. She did not speak at all. Possibly she was afraid her voice would let her down.

  And then the noises above ceased; there was a long pause, a scraping groan like the sliding of a bolt in a rusty socket, the creak of an old hinge. A disc of vague pallor appeared, gray against the dark, quickly broken by the silhouette of Ipthor, crook-legged and nimble, more insect than reptile. Fern climbed faster. It was only when she was finally outside, gulping the wholesome air like a parched nomad at an oasis, that she found her limbs were shaking from the effort and her fingers, cramped from clutching the spikes, would not immediately uncurl.

  “Where are we?” Rafarl demanded.

  “See that road over there? That’s the eastward road to the Bay of Lhune. It crosses the coast road about a mile from here. Where are you headed?”

  “I’ll know when I get there. Here—” He tossed the pouch to Ipthor. “Thanks.”

  Ipthor tugged it open, automatically checking the contents. “Diamonds!” he sighed. “Diamonds are for desperation. Ixavo would have paid in hard currency. Five hundred phénix apiece, no less. Or so I was told.”

  “You should have taken it,” Rafarl said lightly.

  “Ara-yé.” The evil grin danced and fled. “Too late now.”

  He disappeared back into the shaft, pulling the trapdoor shut behind him. Fern sat down on a milestone which announced they were three leagues out of the city. “We’ve got a long walk ahead,” Rafarl told her. “Put on your shoes.”

  The night was growing old; they had been many hours underground. The sky over the eastern horizon was already starting to lighten: Fern could see distant mountain-shapes emerging to the north, maybe part of a volcanic chain with the natural fortress-harbo
r of Atlantis as an isolated outpost. The broad valley-plain lay between, perceptible in the gloaming merely as fields of shadow stretching away and away, with few trees and only a single gleam of water far off, reflecting the moonlight long after the moon had set. The paved road marched across the landscape with the resolution of its builders, straight as a rule. “We must reach the crossroads before dawn,” said Rafarl. “After that, we have to get out of sight.” They set off along the empty road, listening for horses’ hooves and the rumor of pursuit, hearing only the zither-music of the cicadas and the call of a night bird, flying home before the onset of morning.

  They reached the coast just short of noon. Turning north at the crossroads they had gone only a short distance before Rafarl chose a faint track on the right which meandered uncertainly through the pale grasses, petering out close to an abandoned farmstead. But Rafarl had found another path, even if it was not the one he was looking for, keeping in the lee of any available trees, descending at last into a gully where the thread of a river gurgled half-heartedly in a bed of cracked mud. They had followed it, screened by the banks, until the ditch became a cleft and the languid water gathered itself together for a final sprint and poured in a slender fall down a low cliff toward the sea. Fern and Rafarl clambered down beside it, drinking from the pool below, which was clear if not particularly cold, before skirting the sand and crossing a stony promontory to the next cove, and the next. They had traveled perhaps another mile when Rafarl alighted on the destination he sought. It was a shallow cave, its entrance almost hidden by a rock-fall, evidently cut off at high tide since damp weed sprawled on the threshold, but within the floor sloped upward and the sand was powdery and dry. Fern sank down on it, exhausted from a long day and a longer night, dizzy from walking under the relentless sun. She was too tired to eat the food Rafarl proffered, too tired even to bathe or wash the filth from her clothes. She curled up on the sand with her head on a weed-cushioned boulder and fell instantly into sleep.

  When she awoke, the first thing she heard was the sea. The familiar sense of dislocation ensued, but this time she thought that outside the cave there was a shoreline of silver, and fiery waves spreading their sparks upon the sand. She felt no panic, only a singing in her blood and a moment of hopeless struggle, as she snatched in vain at a long-lost image, too precious to forget, too magical to remember. And then she came to full awareness, and saw there was daylight beyond the cave-mouth, and all the details of their escape from the city returned to her, driving the fleeting impression back into the realm of fantasy.

  She got to her feet and went outside, into the apricot glow of early evening. The tide had retreated since their arrival and the falling sun stretched her shadow out before her on the sand, impossibly tall and thin; beyond it, the leisurely rollers drifted ceaselessly inshore, crumbling into gold in the last rays of day. On the headland to her left she saw the white pillars of a house, partially concealed by a cluster of trees. But she could see no sign of human occupation and even at that range she thought a section of the roof was missing. Rafarl was nowhere about but his clothes were drying on a rock and the small pack his mother had given him still lay on the floor of the cave. She decided to follow his example, rinsing her things in a pool and then spreading them out beside his. The advancing shade of the ridge would soon eclipse them but it remained very hot, though the air was fresher than in the city. She ran down the beach and plunged in among the golden waves, tumbling over and over in water almost as warm as her bath of the previous night. Then she swam out farther and watched the dancing sunfire dying around her and a pale mauve twilight spreading swiftly across the vast discus of the ocean. “Fernani!” came a call, and there was Rafarl, standing at the water’s edge with the foam frilling his ankles, naked but for a brief loincloth secured with a thong about his waist, his arms, legs, shoulders flushed to copper in the sunset. He raced into the sea toward her and she knew a sudden spasm of panic, or something like panic, realizing she too was naked, and she turned and dived like a seal, but too late, too late, he caught hold of her and they were sinking down together, down into deeps of blue in a chaos of tangled limbs and spiraling bubbles. And then he must have pushed off from the sea-floor because now the rush was upward to emerge in an explosion of spray and light, and Fern was gasping for the breath she had not had time to take, half furious, half laughing, and Rafarl’s arms were around her, and her breasts against his breast.

  Slowly now they swam ashore, and lay side by side in the shallows with the fallout of breaking waves swirling around them. He opened her mouth with his tongue, and her body seemed to awaken at his touch, even as at the touch of the Lodestone, but this was a different kind of burning, more heat than flame, closer to the dark heart of Earth, a magic of this world and not another. Her mind floated away and she was lost in her senses, and her resistance was merely a fleeting hesitation, and there was a stab like a knife-thrust deep inside her, stab on stab, thrust on thrust, but the pain turned all to sweetness, and the tears of the sea tasted salt on her lips. Her Task was forgotten; the broken memories which eluded her, the destruction of the Stone, Zohrâne’s madness, the key—gone and forgotten. There was only Now. The sun had vanished long since and a purple dusk drew over them like a cloak. And still the sea, untiring, surged and sank, surged and sank, against the island shore.

  Later in the night they returned to the cave and slept a while, out of reach of the rising tide. Before dawn they got up and swam out toward the sunrise, and the morning came sparkling across the water to meet them. A couple of thin cloud-wisps straddled the horizon like wide-winged birds, fire-bellied in the advent of day. “Once,” said Rafarl, “men would have believed they were birds, the albatrosses who were the messengers of the Unknown God, bringing Him news of all that passes in the world. Now, we believe only in ourselves. All else is fairy tales and nonsense.” Fern wondered if the edge in his voice was scorn or regret, and if he himself knew what he really felt.

  “Which aspect of nature would you worship,” she asked, “if you could make a god for yourself? The sun? The moon?”

  “The sea.”

  “What about Love?” she teased him.

  “Love is not meant to be worshipped,” he retorted. “It’s meant to be enjoyed. Anyway, it’s the business of men, not gods.”

  Back on the beach he inquired, idly: “Where did you learn to swim so well? The Viroc mountains are a long way from the coast.”

  The Viroc? For a few seconds, her mind was a blank. The Viroc . . .

  “I expect there were lakes,” he suggested, disturbed by the sudden emptiness in her face.

  The lake came into her thought as if at his bidding, a blue-green spit of water between snow-capped heights, cold as a glacier. “Yes,” she said, “there was a lake. It was freezing, even in summer. I suppose . . . I must have learned there. Anyway, I thought everyone could swim. It’s natural, like running. You don’t have to learn to run.”

  She ran along the sand to prove it, and he chased her, and there was no more talk for a while. Afterward she thought: I have no memories anymore. The package of images she had been carrying around with her seemed to have faded; her hovering confusion had ceased. She existed only in the moment, caught in a teardrop of Time, without past or future. Strangely, it did not trouble her. She was pillowed on Rafarl’s chest, their limbs interlaced; the beat of his heart was loud in her head. She thought: I am his lover. They had made no promises, no vows; this was an interlude which might end with the next sunset or ebb with the changing tide. Yet she knew, with a certainty that belongs only to the young, that this was for always. Whether she had a year, or a week, or just a few hours, she would make it last forever.

  “We can stay here till the hunt loses interest,” Rafarl murmured, echoing her thought. “A fortnight maybe. Or less. The temple hierarchs must have other problems to concern them.”

  “What will we eat?” asked Fern pragmatically.

  “Fruit. Fish. Each other.” He bit her arm, gently. “I
’ve been wondering . . . Ixavo almost seemed to recognize you. Have you met before?”

  “No.” Doubt made her brusque.

  “It’s you he wants, not me. I’m just an accessory. Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Abstractedly, he stroked her hair. “There are too many things you don’t know.” And, after a while: “They say the Gifted can see beyond knowledge. Maybe that is how he saw you—in a basin of moonlight, in the smoke of a spellfire, in the eye of his mind.”

  “Maybe,” said Fern; but she didn’t believe it.

  Around midday they climbed the headland to the deserted house. “This is where Tamiszandre spent her last days,” Rafarl said. “No one comes here now.” It was a still, sunlit place, filled with a tranquility that felt like sadness. Around the back an orchard had run wild, sending exploratory branches through the stricken roof, beginning the invasion of the courtyard with questing offshoots and saplings that elbowed the paving-stones aside. They plucked silver and golden peaches and ate them on the terrace overlooking the sea. Here, too, the garden was taking over, insidious tendrils snaking round the pillars and miniature creepers, goblin-fingered, working on the demolition of balustrade and walls, finding a roothold in every chink and cranny. Divided from the continent since the ending of the Age of Ice, Atlantis had inevitably evolved its own ecosystem, with flora and fauna unlike their mainland cousins. The radiation-field of the Lodestone had stimulated or enhanced each variation, and now the island gloried in a thousand kinds of uniqueness. Rafarl told her the names of those flowers he knew: the pale, diminutive bloom with the bloodred heart called starwound, the clusters of yellow paramour hanging from every rafter, fantassels, speckled fairyfoot, deadly venomel. Birds as small as butterflies and butterflies as large as birds came to sip at the copious supplies of nectar. Coral-pink swans with black beaks, nearly twice the size of their mainland relatives, flew overhead: the phénix of Atlantean coinage. Somewhere high up they saw an eagle, with a wingspan that dwarfed the swans.