Lempriere's Dictionary (101 page)

Heliotrope-Sprite, vector bent about the sun. A drab November fireball climbed over the eastern horizon, rolled west and fell into the night. He skimmed across the waves until Rochelle was a dying ember behind him. The rolling wave of souls extended to either side, thousands of tiny black wings stranded between the sea-surface and rare aether above, weighted with their protests which surrounded him and mingled with his mother’s words until they were garbled and formed anew.
Find them, tell him, kill them, tell them
…. He tried to flee but they pursued him, shrieking and screaming, never letting him rest until his resolution was made. The task stretched ahead of him like an expanse of empty days. They had been abandoned, sacrificed, betrayed. But there would be redress. There would be settlement. Eight pairs of eyes turned from the city’s wreck to the seas beyond. Eight men saw him hurled from the window, fall blazing to the harbour, saw the arc of his fall flatten, saw the flames doused and the body rise tempered and directed in a broad curve out to sea. And there was one who saw none of this, a ninth.… He circled high over the dying city and watched as its walls and bastions were razed. He saw columns of men and women trudge east into the marshlands and in the ragged mouth of the harbour engineers toiling to dismantle the mole. He felt constrictions as his orbit grew wider, resistances, as though Rochelle was a mass exerting a force which he could not escape. He ranged about the clear air and sensed a more distant pull. A second body called from the north-east, a different destination which dragged him around until his circle became a wide ellipse. His motions were only partly his own. The souls of the Rochelais were trapped and he with them. The sun would rise and fall and whirl about the earth and he would swing north and east, then spin down in a helical glide to the second focus of his elliptical kingdom. He would see the broad smudge of coastlines hem a glassy sea and abutting that sea with high cliffs an island of grass scored with fences, tracks and roads, the verdure broken by outcrops of red granite. The island is Jersey, called Caesarea by the Romans, where he would find the proxies for his task: the Lemprières.

Investments: the silence of Jersey’s night would be broken with whispers, rumours, infernal stories. He would come in guises, descending from
the air to visit them in turn over the decades which followed. There would be intimations of what had happened, hints of what might be: the flight of the Nine from the burning city, their exile, the Company and its prime movers, mysterious ships disappearing and reappearing, a lost legacy, an inheritance waiting to be claimed and even as he dropped these crumbs to his elected surrogates he would hear the thin wail of the souls start up. Then his face would cloud over, his seeming-casual manner dissolve into vagueness and his persuasive words falter. More than once a Lemprière had leaned across then and inquired solicitously after his health before recalling him to his theme ‘… yes, a ship of four hundred tons …’ or the fire, the treasure or any one of a thousand other details which might combine to drag the Nine from their den up into the light which blazed out of Rochelle. They were buried deep, and he was a creature of the air. The face across the table would nod, or recoil in horror at the charges. He needed these men, investing them as his proxies and sending them after the Nine as his mother had sent him after her lover and husband; his father. He needed the Lemprières, and they served his needs. They went forth under his banner as warriors, scouts, spies, agents provocateurs, seekers after the truth, exacters of revenge. They returned, if at all, as corpses: floating in on the tide, clutching their throats as the poison swelled their tongues, stabbed, crippled, hunted down, torn apart. He would look down on the cadaver, wait, then move on to the next. He never told the successor of his legacy. If he harboured doubts, the unquiet souls would scream and the sky would open its vast reproachful eye which looked down on him un-blinkingly until his purpose was reaffirmed, the next Lemprière invested and the cycle begun again. He was their curse; a miasma or pestilence of the soul. He thought of Asiaticus’s last pamphlet and knew himself as Xerxes, the general who cowered behind his troops and asked how many might survive the slaughter.

Justice would reach a long arm after the Nine. Expected, allowed for, justice came at intervals and wore different guises and faces. The angles were always altered, the siege or the ships, the Company or citadel, never the same bearing twice. Only the name never changed: Lemprière. From the stony corridors and passages of their lair beneath the city, they sent his emissaries back to him. His hand drove the steady succession on, father to son down generations and decades, the legacy becoming a curse until he saw the Lemprières as a line of dead men stretching back into the past and forward into the future, hardly born before doomed to play the failed revenger and perish. And behind them all, the weight of souls pressed forward urging release, the citadel still burned and his mother’s words ran like a single thread through all the tangle of lives cut short that night. He flew the high altitudes and looked up to the stellar spaces which he could
not reach. Cold lights signalled junctions and invisible lines ran across the night sky marking tangents and arcs in the blue-black dome. He saw the map of his ascent traced for him already in the vault of heaven. He wanted to rise higher but his limbs were leaden, the aether too thin to take him up. He looked down and saw the ocean’s basin heave and slop. There were no routes marked for him in its chopping monotone, no possible vectors, only the Lemprières and the Nine and himself lodged between them. He flew on, but the sky was pushing fingers of light into the night-sky which tightened to a balled fist of fire rising over the horizon. The furnace blazed in his face and his old terror rose to meet it. He saw the floor buckle, the Rochelais slide down into the flames below. He saw his own face begin to char from the heat. The fire would always beat him. The sea was a glaring sheet of light, suddenly calm beneath him. Ahead was the island where his latest emissary waited.

Keeping the arm steady, that was the knack. He was early, waiting for his man at the inn in Saint Helier. Market noises outside disturbed him for a moment. He settled again, then extended his arm, lifted and began to gulp. The liquid slid down his throat, his eyes began to water and then he was coughing and spluttering, handing the emptied yard back to his opponent who was slapping him on the back and passing it over to be refilled. ‘Good man, good man!’ He belched and grinned. His body was tall, his adopted face clean-shaven, with dark colouring. He was a marine surveyor. His drinking companion had learned of this then launched into a long technical monologue to do with lagoon harbours. He was the captain of a vessel unloading in the harbour below, an affable man of forty or more. It was mid-morning and the inn was quiet. They had differed over groynes and the drinking-bout was the result. Now the captain drank in his turn but the yard of ale seemed a furlong, a mile…. Too far and he dashed it down half-drunk, defeated. Septimus offered consolation and the conversation drifted. Presently, a tall man entered, paused and looked around the room. Septimus excused himself and rose to greet the man. ‘Mister Philips?’ Philips, Philpot, Philby, any name but his own. It made no difference. They sat down together and it was only then that he noticed the boy who stood by the man and who watched him in unblinking silence. He talked in an undertone of harbour draughts and tonnages, of a strange ship running unknown cargoes up the coast, of Rochelle. The man knew something of the matter already and talked of his father who had had suspicions, but he was dead now and the matter might have been closed. The boy stared solemnly at him throughout. Yes, it was very interesting, intriguing. He would look into it after his return from Paris. An investment; a wallpaper factory, in partnership with a friend. Then he had risen, but the boy had only stood there, still staring, until his father was forced to call him, ‘Come
now, son….’ The boy was in a world of his own. His father called again, ‘John?’

Looking down on the
Vineeta
as she entered the estuary he saw the same strange child, full-grown now. The earlier face had remarked itself to him in the inn. The child stared with a peculiar intensity as though he knew the stranger before him for what he was. This stranger had led his forbears to their deaths at the hands of the Nine, now he sought the same for his father. Perhaps Septimus suspected even then that Charles would fail and was already gauging his son for the task. He peered into the boy’s face and his gaze focused on the eyes whose pupils were swollen to black port-holes in the dim interior of the inn. He looked closer. Something moved behind the boy’s eyes. The boy might be the one. He looked again, yes, certain now. He would have to get close, close enough to guide him to the sticking point. But once there, he would not fail. Tiny fingures moved behind the boy’s eyes, like souls but with their features all jumbled together. They were energetic, scrambling and jostling together. The souls of the Rochelais dead could sense them and responded with wailings and protests so insistent that Septimus could hardly keep the visage before him. The boy’s face was perfectly expressionless, his stare quite even and in the end he had to look away. Charles Lemprière called to his son from the door but either the boy chose to ignore the summons or he was lost in some other, private version of the world. He never guessed the boy might simply be short-sighted. Charles called again. The boy turned and walked solemnly across to his father. On the far side of the inn his late drinking-companion shifted in his seat. Captain Guardian stirred himself and called for food. A girl swung her hips around the counter towards him. He would have to get close. The boy was his own omen. There were demons in his head, eumenides and avenging furies. Abandoned gods for the abandoned Rochelais. He looked back to the doorway but Charles and his son were already gone.

Metamorphoses: Septimus into the Flying Man, the carrier of souls, avenging and recording angel, the Sprite of Rochelle; Rochelle into ashes and ashes into the miasmal fog behind which the Nine had fled to London; London into their unwitting host. He must get closer…. After the meeting on Jersey, Septimus into Company cadre, an eager initiate proving his worth to the unseen powers that be, a young recruit sending false signals to bring the admirals closer. The admirals into the Nine, the Nine into something other.… He sensed it as the Viscount and his partner questioned him, some non-human addition. He must not arouse their suspicions. Septimus into their accomplice, part of the developing plot against this next and latest Lemprière. Charles into a torn corpse by the edge of the pool on Jersey. Septimus will be a trusted lieutenant to the
Nine, a false-faced Achates to Lemprière’s doomed Aeneas, a betrayer of both camps. Then, when they told him the plan and his own part in its execution, he remembered the boy’s face from the inn. They would deceive him with their actors, engines and machinery, give him his demons in the flesh. They would send him into madness and bring him back as one of their own. He was the last of the Lemprières, different from the others. At first he thought they knew, that they had seen the same demons in the boy’s eyes that he had seen himself. It was not so. They sought to convince the boy of something that was already true. They did not know how their victim might change. Metamorphoses of the Lemprière: into fatherkiller, into madman, into seeker after truths. Septimus had watched his arrival in the city, his wrong-headed turns about the market, his bungling search for his lodgings. He had flown by the uncurtained window and seen his sleeping face bleached white by the moonlight. He had risen and looked down on the sleeping city, seeing in its network of streets and alleys the emerging tracery of an older conflict. Lemprière into his own revenger.

Nothing prepared him for their meeting as adults. Lemprière stood brandishing a piece of smoking wood, spindly legs planted in defiance, spluttering and eyes streaming behind a pair of owlish eye-glasses as Septimus introduced himself the next day. At Skewer’s, he asked irrelevant questions and day-dreamed. At the Pork Club he fell for the first of the Cabbala’s deceptions and afterwards, in the pouring rain, he sobbed out a story about visions coming true, dogs tearing his father’s flesh, Actaeon’s hubris and Diana’s retribution. Hardly the master of demons he had hoped for. Lemprière was weak, awkward, lacked common sense and confidence, betrayed himself as gullible at Kalkbrenner’s and almost killed himself running into the freezing night at the De Veres’. It was Septimus, his trusted friend, who gave him the dictionary, just as the Nine had instructed, and it was Septimus who led him out to the west pasture to witness the death of the woman in blue. He nudged his charge this way and that through the streets of the city, guiding him through the tangle of trails left behind by the Nine: the voyage of the
Vendragon
, the pamphlets of Asiaticus, the Agreement which bound the Lemprières to the De Veres, the rumours which rolled like sea-mist about Rochelle and thickened to a fog which only the fire could dispel. All the while, the plot concocted against the young man coiled and tightened, flicking and brushing against him then receding as he moved to grasp the implications of details he would notice and still fail to comprehend. Septimus surrounded him with hints and clues but still he blundered on. The dictionary grew and Sir John’s investigation gathered pace. Its arrows were converging on a single point and Lemprière seemed intent on meeting him there. Septimus watched the progress of his proxy and in secret he despaired.

Over the stone cap of the city and its outlying districts, the river and sea beyond, across plains and ranges shaded to grey and black by the sun’s flight, wheeling south along the ragged peninsular coasts and west over the enclosed Middle Sea flew Septimus. The air was clear and cool. Lemprière stumbled and blundered below, seemed almost to welcome the noose which tightened about his neck. The air was consolation. Europe’s dark verdure stretched away beneath him, cut with great rivers and highways. He noted the fumbling engagements of Musselmen and their pale enemies; the entrenchments about Belgrade. The sweet smell of decay drifted in the warmth of spring, invading the cool jet-streams above. A Turkic column was marched west under guard and as he passed high overhead a few faces were turned towards him until the returning call drew him back to his familiar routes.
Find him, tell him
…. He wanted to stay above it all but the Lemprière’s shortcomings drew him down into his own version of this fumbling conflict. It was growing confused. The signals were broken and inexact. He needed spaces to set out his thoughts and hoped to find them in the empty vault of the sky, his own Zero State. Here was Lemprière. Here were the betrayers of Rochelle. Between them stood the figure that was himself. Sir John already suspected this Lemprière, was already part of their design, and the Indian was ambiguity itself. Emissary, assassin, avenger in his own right…. His own instructions arrived through the Secret Committee and sent him to play his part for the Lemprière, just as Rochelle sent him to play its part for the Nine, and his mother a further role. He was Septimus, the hearty counterweight to this Lemprière’s moody introspections, willing agent seconded to the Secret Committee, son of his mother, seeker after a fugitive father and all manner of other versions and roles which dispersed him until only the murmur of souls was a constant. He was a carrier already overburdened with aspects and had no need of more. He never wanted this Lemprière to offer his friendship.