Prospero's Children Read online

  As soon as it was light Rafarl got up, washing and shaving with unaccustomed deliberation. Fern watched, sitting on the couch, naked under the single sheet. “I’m going down to the harbor,” he said. “The Norne will be ready. You still won’t ask?”

  “No.”

  They did not say goodbye.

  Ezramé found her sitting there, dry-eyed and cold. She wrapped her in the priceless veil, heirloom of her house. For all its fineness it was as warm as summer. “I want you to have it,” she said. “What you have to do is obviously very dangerous. It may have some power to protect you.”

  “But you—”

  “I do not need it now.”

  At breakfast, Fern ate little, though she knew she should be hungry. Conversation was brief. Rafarl did not return; his step-father, too, had gone out. Ezramé’s presence warmed her as the veil and the summer could not. “I don’t want you to be alone,” Fern said, meaning, at the end.

  “Aliph will stay with me. He has been with my family for twenty years. I have spoken to him. I told him to find a ship, but he would not.”

  “Maybe we should warn other people.”

  “They would not believe you—or if they did, they would still remain. It is hard to tear yourself from your roots.”

  There was a pause while Fern sipped a drink made from lemons and other, more exotic fruits, the fruits of Atlantis, which would never grow again.

  “What does Norne mean?” she asked, for something to ask. The morning loomed in front of her like a wall, a wall with no gate, save the one she had to close.

  “It’s a kind of witch,” said Ezramé. “A witch of the sea. In Atlantis, there are a hundred words for witch.”

  A witch of the sea. Fern saw a carved prow from which the paint had almost bleached, the skeleton of a hull now high and dry. The familiarity of it was like an ache in a tooth long removed. She would have been afraid, if she had had the time. But there was only a little time left.

  She finished the blended juices slowly, trying to savor the taste—the taste of Atlantis—to hold it in her memory for always. But it is all but impossible to remember a taste, and it had evaporated from her mind almost as quickly as from her mouth. She wanted to hug and kiss and cling, but she and Ezramé just sat, face-to-face, no longer speaking, hand clasping hand.

  It was well before midday when Fern said: “I have to go.”

  XII

  The drum was beating in the temple for the last time. There was a gray haze creeping up from the rim of the sky, tarnishing the sunlight; the gold of the city—of marble and stone, painting and gilding—was dimmed. The strange nimbus which Uuinarde had remarked around the fractured dome had become more noticeable: its fiery luster was blurred as if by a thickening of the air, an imperceptible pollution, its resplendence disseminated into a corona that had the tincture of dust. Up on the mountain there had been a freshness, the hint of a breeze, but in the streets below the atmosphere was that of a sealed room, stifling and curiously tense; every breath tasted of dirt. No one had stopped Fern on her way to the temple, for all her fair skin and alien countenance. Phaidé Dévornine’s veil wrapped her like a film of shadow; she could almost imagine it had the faculty of rendering her, not quite invisible, but somehow unobtrusive. The temple guard had let her pass, and she had arrived unhindered at the Guardian’s apartment. Ixavo found her there when he came to change for the ceremony. “You escaped,” he said, and for an instant his face was blank, as if he did not know how to react, or what expression to assume.

  “Of course.”

  His features shifted, hardened, becoming vulcanized into their customary aspect. “Yet you keep to your bargain. That is wise. At least you have the intelligence to realize there are no alternatives.”

  “It wasn’t a bargain,” she reminded him. “I keep to my fate.”

  And now the throb of the drum was dying, and for Atlantis time was running out, the city’s agelong lifespan shrunk to little more than an hour, the minutes and seconds trickling steadily into eternity. Fern crouched in the amber gloom of the gallery, screened by the balustrade, close to a stair. “I have arranged for the arrest of a nympheline,” Ixavo had told her. “One of my personal guards will escort her to you. He will see she is secured, so she cannot attempt to escape.” The last note of the drum was still vibrating faintly in floor and walls when the man came, leading the nympheline on a short chain. Her head was bowed; long black hair hung forward over her face. When she looked up and the curtain parted her eyes were neither green nor blue but a sea-color in between. She did not speak; nor did Fern. The guard fastened the chain round one of the supports in the balustrade, seemed to hover on the verge of saluting, and then left.

  “You’ve changed sides,” said Uuinarde, low-toned by instinct. They could hear people gathering below. “You betrayed us.”

  “I’m on no one’s side,” said Fern. “I have something to do. I’m trying to do it. That’s all.”

  And: “Why didn’t you go with the porpoises? You could have been far away.”

  “I am an Atlantean,” she responded. “This is my home.” Like Ezramé, Fern thought, and she wondered where her home was, reaching for memories of the village on Mount Vèz, but all she could picture was the house in her dream in the prison-cell, the strange gray house with the steepled roof and the eerie windows reflecting sky. A house she did not even know.

  “Can you undo the chain?” asked Uuinarde, extending her wrist, weighed down by the heavy manacle.

  Fern tried, but without success. “Ixavo will do it,” she said. “He’ll release you, when the moment comes. He has a task for you too.”

  “I won’t help him!”

  “You won’t be helping him,” said Fern. “You’ll be helping me.”

  She thought Uuinarde would object, but there was no more leisure for talk. It seemed to her right that the nymph should be there, a falling-into-place of the jigsaw-puzzle of destiny, and after her initial protest Uuinarde herself appeared to accept it, and the two of them drew close together, peering through the balusters down into the heart of the tabernacle. The drumbeat had started again, not the great drum this time but a soft tattoo, rhythmic as a pulse, finger-tapped on the tabor by a pair of acolytes standing on opposite sides of the chamber. The priests were still taking up their positions, one at each point of the engraved sun-star. They were chosen from the most Gifted, those who would have been called holy, if holiness had been current in Atlantis. Many were related to the twelve families, having taken to the priesthood for further advancement and prestige. Their heads were shaved like Ixavo’s and their split cloaks embroidered so thickly with metallic thread that the folds hung rigid, like strips of wood. They faced the center of the circle, where formerly the Lodestone had rested on its altar.

  But the ancient altar was gone. In its place stood a door, a door without a wall, erected in grotesque isolation in the midst of that vast floor, duplicated by its own reflection, like the lone gateway to a vanished palace, marooned in a standing pool. But the water was hard and did not ripple, and the Door was set under an arch of quartz, with strange growths of jasper and agate on either side, fungoid creatures whose jeweled eyes squinted from toadstool heads, grasping the frame with many claws. The Door itself was black, but the panels were inlaid with obscure hieroglyphs in red gold, the handle was a single ruby, and a tiny reptile encrusted with green stones glittered on the architrave. There was no keyhole anywhere on its surface. A monument to insanity, thought Fern, a nightmare fantasy in gilding and gems, extravagant and crude, ultimately banal, the brainchild of a witch-queen with the taste of a barbarian conquistador. The Gate of Death, or so Zohrâne had claimed, a gate from world to world, from Life to Immortality. But Fern had seen that Gate on a rooftop terrace, had felt its awe and its horror, and she knew Ixavo was right, this was a Door, only a Door, though where it led she could not guess. She will try to open the Gate of Death, had said the Hermit, but the memory of his instruction faded, and she seemed to hear anothe
r voice, clear but very far away, saying “Things are not always what you want them to be.” It came to her that this was her own voice, in some other place or time, but she had no idea to what she referred, no respite to wonder or fear. Two thurifers entered the chamber below, walking at a measured pace, bearing vessels of burning oil from which scented fumes drifted toward the gallery. Behind them came Zohrâne. She wore an ankle-length dress of a silk almost as fine as her veils, glittering as if sprinkled with crushed diamond. Every detail of her anatomy was visible under the shimmer, the tumorous breasts with nipples black as grapes, the red jewel in her navel, the triangular shade of her pubic hair. Long drifts of gauze, tinted with the hues of sunset, orange and vermilion and rose, flowed behind her like a comet’s tail. The hair on her head was stiffened with gum and twisted into a tall conical structure, like a horn, secured with gold wire, a style Fern recognized, though she did not know from where. Possibly it had some ritualistic significance. A faint patina of gold overlaid her eyelids and cheek-bones; her mouth was like polished metal. The key hung on a thread about her neck. Ixavo followed her at a suitable distance. He did not look up at the gallery but assumed a position near to the adjacent stair. The thurifers also drew aside: Zohrâne alone stepped into the sun-star and stood facing the Door.

  Certain preparations had already been made, Fern guessed; she could just distinguish a line of grayish-white powder describing a circle inside the star. No, not a circle, a semicircle, closed off along the diameter that included the threshold of the Door. Zohrâne made a sweeping gesture and spoke a single word, and the line crackled as if taking fire, flickering into a glow, so she was divided from her assistants by an arc of flame. The engravings on the floor also started to pulsate with an elusive radiance, a phantom glimmer that came and went as though at the mercy of an erratic power-source. The priests began a low chant in which Fern could identify only the noun haadé, a reverential term for death. As the chant grew in volume she began to be conscious of the terrible potency of language, the sense that a name spoken is a summons and more than a summons, an act of creation, for a word shapes an idea, an idea shapes belief, and belief shapes the world. The temple was filled with belief, a rising tide of belief, building in force like water behind a dam, and Zohrâne stood in the center controlling it with fluid gestures, her rippling fingers leaving brief trails of light on the air. Her lips moved in an invocation at first inaudible but which grew with the momentum of the ceremony until the murmur had become a crescendo, drowning out the priests. “Haadé! Haadé ai zoiïna! Death for the living! Unlock the Gate, open the Way! Uvalé! Open to the key—the key—the key!” She held it up, and light leaped from her hand onto the Door, a snake of light that writhed and danced across the toadstool faces, the claws of agate, touching them with an obscene animation. The background litany changed, becoming deeper and stronger; the semicircle parted. Many hands plucked a slight figure from the shelter of the cloister and thrust him within the perimeter, which closed behind him, sealing him in. He was very young, perhaps eleven or twelve, nearly naked. He looked this way and that in confusion and fear. Fern’s grip tightened on the rail. Zohrâne let the key drop against her breast and seized his shoulder, pulling him effortlessly toward her, her supple fingers tensed into steel. She raised her other arm: a knife appeared in her grasp where no knife had been before. The boy shrank and seemed to cry out, but his voice was overwhelmed by the rising clamor of the incantation, the pent power was released, and a curtain of flame hissed upward and boiled against the dome. Through a blue haze of fire Fern saw the knife fall—the knife unsheathed from air and nothingness— saw the blade buried deep in the boy’s chest. But the knife was real, and the flesh was real, and the tongue of blood that licked across the floor was red. The spell peaked on a word Fern did not recognize, and Zohrâne bestrode the body, shuddering with an orgasm of power, and the fires silvered and sank, but now the Door was set in a wall, thick as a shadow, and beyond lay a darkness not of Atlantis, and the circle was complete.

  She didn’t need to kill him, thought Fern, somewhere in the stillness at the back of her mind. She knew she had never seen killing before. She didn’t need the sacrifice. She was feeding her ego, not her Gift . . .

  And there was the keyhole, as she had known it would be. A ray of white light sprang from it like a lance, roving the chamber, dwindling to a notch of brilliance. Zohrâne bent over the child, pressing her mouth to his forehead for a long moment in something that only resembled a kiss, as if she sought to suck not his life but his death. Then she straightened, grasping the key, wrenching it from its thread. “I’ll be back,” Fern whispered into Uuinarde’s ear. “I must see . . .” Her footfalls on the stair barely ruffled the all-embracing silence. She found herself beside Ixavo, but it did not matter. Zohrâne was stooping, sliding the key into the lock. It turned with a tiny snick, impossibly loud in that vacuum of noise. And as the queen pulled open the Door, Fern, hiding in the cloister almost directly behind her, the veil drawn instinctively over her face, was one of the few to see what she saw.

  A woman. Attitude for attitude, shock for shock, she seemed to mirror Zohrâne. She might almost have been a specter of the queen’s own death, that Death which she wished to cheat and defy: waxen-cheeked and haggard, skeleton-thin, her dim hair leached of all color. And in her eyes Fern thought she glimpsed the same hunger, the same emptiness, before all was lost in the blankness of absolute bewilderment. She wore a dress of some unknown material, more opaque than Zohrâne’s but equally clinging, dull red like old blood. Behind her there was only a dark in which the completed fire-lines of sun and circle floated like star-trails in the void. This is no other world, Fern told herself, inexplicably certain. One witch has found another: spell has turned on spell, seeker on seeker. There are no loopholes into eternity. Zohrâne’s back was toward her but she could see the tensing of her muscles, the involuntary tightening of her grip on the knife. And at the same moment she was conscious of a swelling sound, beyond the silence, a noise that would have filled her with new panic had she not been concentrating wholly on the Door. She took a step forward, heedless of discovery; thought she heard the woman speak. And over her right shoulder, for a fraction of a second, she saw someone else. Someone outside the perimeter as she was outside the perimeter, white-faced and desperate, peering through into Atlantis. She froze.

  “Fool!” The admonition came from Ixavo; he was grabbing her arm, wrenching her away from the sight. “Don’t you know not to look? Run!” They were on the stair even as Zohrâne dropped the knife, raising her hand. The clamor now shook the chamber, a great rushing, roaring din in which all individual sound was lost, filling the world. Darkness reared above the dome; the sun was blotted out. As they reached the gallery Ixavo was already shrieking an enchantment too primitive for speech, a gibbering of animal voices from the aeons before language was invented. He flung Fern down beside Uuinarde and towered above them, his face distorted from the utterance of sounds not meant for human throat, sounds more sensed than heard against the onslaught of noise from outside. And then the Sea came, falling on the dome with all the weight of the five oceans, crushing the gilded roof like sugar glass, and the gold and the beams and the black water were crashing down on them, and terror fled and panic, and there was no more circle, no more ritual, no more time . . .

  Fern’s arms were around Uuinarde: the nympheline’s face was buried in her shoulder. She looked up, and saw Ixavo had drawn on the sea itself to shield them, encasing them in a great bubble, a skin of water tugged this way and that by the pressures without, wavering, flexing, bulging. Ixavo’s own features seemed to be pulled and pummelled as he struggled to keep the membrane intact. She felt the quiver in the ground itself, the cracking of supports below. The gallery floor began to sag; Uuinarde’s head jerked back with a scream she could not hear. Ixavo had no strength to spare for the earthquake. But Fern was already groping with her mind, without hesitation or thought, reaching down into the very foundations, clenching ro
ck on rock, holding the shuddering pillars with her willpower, her Gift, her belief. Her ears closed out the sea’s howling: she was exploring deep in the Earth, feeling for the quickening heartbeat of the planet, fighting to get a grip on rending stone and the jolting of plate against plate— No! Ixavo’s warning seared through her brain. Don’t spend your strength! You cannot do it! Focus your power here—only here—Reluctantly she let go, withdrawing into the cell of their immediate safety. Below, she sensed a chasm tearing through the temple floor, felt the pouring sea boil in the updraft of escaping gases. But beyond the fragile protection of the bubble she could see only the seething dark.