Lempriere's Dictionary (82 page)

‘Here,’ he pointed to the place, and then the name came. ‘It began here, here at….’

But he did not finish. Septimus caught him under the arms even before he crumpled from the blow and lowered him to the floor.

‘Rochelle,’ he whispered in Lemprière’s unconscious ear. ‘All of it began at Rochelle.’

T
HE ANTICYCLONE
moved east from the Azores towards Portugal then north as dawn rose on the thirteenth of July. Gradual isobars channelled a sweeping breeze inland east and north in a crescent of summer turbulence. Rippling over the flat plains and mountain ranges, the anticyclone began its passage inland as sunshine fell on the broad waters of the Danube whose banks sucked in the shadows of night. Its pressured heart tightened as the sun rose higher and the winds blew a little harder. Still air over Mitteleurope began to spin in sympathy, setting off further eddies in turn, and more beyond them as the process began to replicate itself in ever fainter and more numerous twists, clockwise and anticlockwise, each frontier more complex and less definite than the last as they spread north and east, kicking up dust and shaking leaves from the Golden Horn to the Hook of Holland. Local prevailing winds - the mistral, sirocco, tramonta, various foehns - disrupted and contributed until the currents and cross-currents, interference patterns and pressure zones were jumbled together in a weather-system whose complexity outran its observers and left them adjusting wind-blown instruments. Whole orders of information wafted and gusted past in secret sweet abandon rippling through the billion blades of grass, grains of sand, motes of dust, and if there was an instrument to register the effects of this system, from its merest nanospan to greatest gigascale it was a land mass nothing short of Europe. Its needles were already twitching, its ports wide open and circuits humming with a music so confused it could only be heard as a monotone. But, for the perfect observer, for the single invested overseer of this straining engine….

The Emperor Joseph watched from his balcony at Peterwaradin as laundresses pinned out bed linen, his own, in the garden below. Great
white squares flapped in the gusting wind, each faintly stained but washed and washed again until the trails he deposited there nightly faded into a general off-whiteness. He was thinking gloomily of the Crimean Tartars who the latest despatches told him had taken their Russian-supplied muskets off to several strategically irrelevant mountain strongholds rather than sit about and starve in the Banat with his own more orderly forces. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps the Turks were right, or Count Ewald von Hertzberg, or his own Internuncio who, he remembered now, had counselled against this war months before. Now he had vanished without trace. The Sublime Porte was currently claiming an Austrian privateer had captured him in the seas off Sicily and was holding him to ransom. And this only a week after his much-bruited execution of Sergeant Vittig for the Karlstadt massacre, which was intended as a conciliatory gesture. Now, he heard, his dragoons were shouting
For Vittig and Austria!
as they charged the Turkic cannonades and ballads about himself and the Russian Empress circulated freely amongst his forward divisions. By night he acted out their criticisms, appearing before her in his slimy bed linen while she performed in riding boots and spurs above his quivering flesh, a fingertip here, an earlobe there, a refined and exquisite surgery with steel-tipped incisors until his organs lay detached on the table beside her whereupon she would take them one by one and, firmly astride him, drop them into her mouth like so many peeled grapes. He would awake then and view the drainage of his needs on the sheet beneath him. Sometimes he would trace a finger along the thick wet jets, noting convergences and coincident trajectories, how one spurt might veer off to the side and follow the line of another, or cross over it to produce a more tangible gobbet, and sometimes he wondered if all these random emissions were extrapolated and traced forward infinitely, might there be a point, some central node at which they would converge? Might there be a point from which the sense in it all would be plainly visible? He heard a
crump
and for a moment he thought it might be a howitzer. Below him, the wind was rumpling his sheets. He looked away, disappointed at this anticlimax. He heard the girls from the laundry tittering to each other. He sought the perfect point and wondered where it was all leading. The giggling below came louder. What were they telling him, these secret messages from himself to himself? The wind rose in a quick buoyant gust. Visible and invisible trails criss-crossed in a fabulous lattice as the girls began folding the sheets. Where did they lead, these glistening trails? They were giggling again as the sheets were straightened and folded, laughing louder and louder, shrieking and screaming and the Emperor Joseph clapped his hands over his ears willing them to stop, but the hysterical noise went on and on. What, he demanded of himself, what was the meaning of the cryptic slime?

The anticyclone moved closer. Its centre shifted north, nudging the edge of the landmass as though searching for an entrance. Inland and out to sea the curved winds got up and pulled against the central pressure zone. The sun rose higher and the sluggish warmth of the preceding days focused itself in a hot breeze. The engine hummed a little louder. In the perfect spheres and cylinders of the topiary trees, along the precise lines of clipped privet, leaves and stipules twitched their lighter undersides in and out of view, light and dark. The mirror of the lake gave way to a new corrugated surface whose diagonals ran west to east and zig-zagged as the wind broke through the restraining surface tension. Lawns flashed indecipherable messages as individual blades of grass flattened themselves this way or that, all in concert, all collaborating against the mown squares and trimmed rectangles. The sun turned them into heliographs reflecting new and confusing ciphers that seemed to curve away from within the straightforward logic of the gardens towards a wilder perspective and a different destination.

Taking the levée, His Majestry traced the gliding movements of pomaded and powdered figures across the parquet towards him. A bow or curtsey, a rustle of finished silk and away. He thought of the escapement of watches, the movement up the tooth of the cog, a soft trip, and down. Then the next, and the next, around and around forever.

‘Ah, Monsieur!’ A sleek figure floated towards him, paused, and then away to be replaced by another. Around and around, like the earth about the sun, or the moon about the earth. When he stood up and made his way out, everyone stood up and he advanced through their neat human corridor to the door, whereupon they closed behind him. Take the sun, he thought. It radiated out, drawing all the planets about it for a retinue. Without it they would fly off who knows where on quite incalculable paths, detrimental ones possibly. The authority of the sun was, in this model, a kind of largesse. One
gave
commands,
gave
orders, for example. So far, so good. The planets and their satellites behaved in a certain way, flew along certain paths at certain speeds, reappeared here and there at certain intervals…. This was homage and was needed, he supposed, to keep the sun in place. Now came the difficult part.

He felt sunlight hot on his face and a hot wind as he stepped onto the terrace. The day was beautiful and breezy. Garden people scattered and melted away. As the planets and so forth went around and around, their lines never met, but their forces (centripetal, centrifugal, gravitational, the pulls of competing masses, in short the
sum
) were the sun. Or rather, the lines drawn across the diameters of their orbits all met in the sun. That was better. All in the sun.

He descended the steps and advanced on the orange trees. Behind him,
his retinue came to a halt on the last step above the parterre. The lake glittered enticingly in the distance. He waved at them and they retreated backwards up the steps. Possibly he should have continued on around the terrace. All lines met in the sun, even the most divergent. The lines of orange trees drew nearer now and he moved amongst the slatted pots admiring the sculpted spheres his gardeners had created about him. The wind had risen and though the outward forms of the trees remained serried in long lines stretching off into some other quirk of perspective, the leaves within these bulbous globes were all confused as breezes and gusts deranged them, flipping them about until they were all higgledy-piggledy and Louis frowned. His retinue disappeared around the corner of the terrace, following some nominal version of himself. The leaves rustled. He looked again down the long lines, fancying he saw a slight curve. Louis advanced further, then frowned again. He had thought his orange trees had got beyond this, but the rows curled into one another and his vista of the lake was quite spoilt. Behind him, it was the same story. Still, he had come this far….

He turned and crossed into the adjacent row but the orange trees were placed very close together and when he struggled through he found them quite as disorderly as those he had left. He advanced again, or thought he did, but only found himself back where he started. He paused, then moved off. Much better. Any moment now he would emerge in front of the lake. But he grew confused when he seemed to strike a path that led him at right angles, then in a tight arc, then it narrowed and he might well have been back at the starting point yet again. It was difficult to tell. He moved off, again, but had hardly taken a pace this time before the orange trees clustered so thickly he was forced to stop. The sun shone down unhelpfully. The leaves rustled in relays up, down and across, from all directions and angles. He began to take a step, but the resistance was strong, the impedance high. He stopped, on the point of setting off again. The orange trees shifted behind him. He would set off again soon, or even now. The leaves, the invisible ripples on the artificial lake and the blades of grass on the lawns all jiggled in disorderly concert. Quite soon now. Orange trees moved and closed around like satellites. The sun was fixed above. Quite soon. He stopped. The heliograph-lawns blinked on and off, chattering in staccato binary, the lake made tiny troughs and peaks and the leaves signed on and off, faster and faster until the message was a blur and every port of the machine hovered, every gate swung both open and shut. The difference between its one- and zero-states narrowed to the State, and within the State trails criss-crossed and spread, interacted and commingled, acted and countered one another so that the field of operations became a field of possibilities, the lattice of trails a cloud in which
any event likely to take place was almost as likely not to and now, from this perspective at least, the whole ergodic panoptic salmagundi appears abundantly, blindingly clear.

The airborne pressure zone hovered off the Iberian peninsula, nosed inquisitively about the Bay of Biscay and moved north. Up the Atlantic coast, past the mouth of the Gironde, the anticyclone spun towards Île d’Oléron. Brisk winds preceded it and followed in its wake. Its centre was quite still. Sitting on the hillside, overlooking the jetty, Duluc and Protagoras felt the novel sensation of an easterly breeze at their backs. The sun was in their faces and still high. They sat patiently. Soon the carts would arrive. Then night would fall. Sometime after that they would ready the signal-beacon and sometime after that the signal would be answered. Out of all their frantic efforts and those of their partners across the water, out of all the freak and engineered meetings, chance collisions, when all the values were weighed one against the other and almost every force had met and countered its opposing force,
then
, a single super-charged particle would emerge from the carnage and make for them along a single possible vector and, when the
Vendragon
finally docked at their jetty, this force too would be cancelled with all the others and the final trail would have come to its end.

Now the wind began to die away and presently the two of them found themselves sitting in a strange calm. They looked at one another, then both turned their gazes out to sea. The engine had reached its most precarious state and the eye of the coming storm looked down on them all. The still centre of the anticyclone rested directly over Rochelle.

As the months of summer dragged by, Nazim felt his mission drift away from him. He stood in the baking heat behind the tackle of Butler’s Wharf and watched the
Vendragon
loll in the water for days that stretched into weeks. Sometimes, for variety as much as purpose, he would hang about the back of Thames Street and stare at the lightless windows of Le Mara’s house. But the
Vendragon
was loaded, or forgotten, or abandoned by her masters - his enemies, he reminded himself- and Le Mara seemed to have disappeared into thin air.

There was no doubt they knew of his existence. He had advertised his presence on the quay to Le Mara from the outset. He was an alien body, a resistant particle that jammed and fouled the smooth workings of their machine. He tried to believe his watchful presence was a kind of pressure
under which their operations would buckle and break, spilling the information he needed like so much oil. But it was not so. Their actions, if he were truthful, were no more apparent to him now than when he had walked down the gangplank of the
Nottingham
nine months before. They were making ready, they
were
making ready. But for what?