The Adventures of Mr. Maximillian Bacchus and His Travelling Circus (9 page)

“And now,” he said. “The jewel of Xanadu. The greatest mystery. The finest splendour. The daughter.”

At this announcement the courtiers began to shake the boughs of their trees, so that leaves cascaded in every direction, and from a silver birch, the Princess leapt. Her silks too, swelled like a ripe fruit around her as she drifted down to meet the floor. Her naked feet touched the cool mosaic and her rustling robes folded about her like moths’ wings. Everyone took a deep breath. It was as if the soul of the silver birch, dislodged in a windless autumn, had fallen from the branches, to walk among men.

“Look at her,” whispered Hero, his eyes wide.

The Princess stood before the company and curtsied to each in turn. Mr. Bacchus grinned and shook her hand; Ophelia curtsied and said, “Thank you ma’am,” because it was royalty. Hero bowed very low and looked at his feet. Domingo grinned and bowed extravagantly several times, and Bathsheba attempted a curtsey but somehow ended with her hands, legs and tail in a knot. When the Princess came to Angelo, however, he bowed and looked straight into her eyes. The leaves on the mosaic floor rustled in the breath of her sigh.

Malachi, meanwhile, who was bowing, waiting for the Princess to come to him, coughed loudly, and began to sway. But Angelo and the Princess seemed to not hear. Then the Khan spoke, and they blinked as if waking from a dream within the dream of Xanadu.

“Daughter,” said the Khan, his tone less friendly than before. “It is time these good gentlemen prepared their performance for us.”

“Of course, father,” said the Princess, without looking at the Khan, and she dutifully took her place next to the throne. The Khan’s eyes were on Angelo when he said:

“The Princess will never marry, for, in truth, she is not my daughter, but the daughter of my brother, Kuyuk.”

Immediately a whisper ran through the branches of the court, as if some terrible secret was about to be imparted. But the great Khan stood up and the whispers were instantly silenced. His eyes scoured the throne-room and dared anyone to speak.

“My brother,” he said deliberately, “is dead. And his daughter is in mourning for him. She will never marry.”

Then he turned to Mr. Bacchus.

“Tomorrow night,” he commanded. “your Circus will perform. Then you must leave Xanadu, before Death’s wings beat the walls to dust.” Then the gong struck, to signify that the audience was at an end, and Mr. Bacchus’ Circus was escorted in silence out of the throne-room, to the caravan, which had been driven from the first gate, through to the seventh.

****

That night, though the fragment of the sun burned as bright as day over Xanadu, the company slept quite soundly. With the exception of Angelo. He walked around the seven walls at least three times, head bowed, hands in pockets. Once or twice, he sat in the shadows of a wall’s buttress, and played his pipe. In his mind’s eye he could see the Princess’ face, could see her leaping time and time again from the Birch tree, sighing.

And to her sighs he added his own.

At three in the endless morning the walls were suddenly alive with shouting figures, pointing up at the dome. Astride the Chimera’s back stood a bird-headed creature, holding aloft a silver box. And into it he was putting the fragment of the sun.

In their panic, the soldiers lining the walls were firing volley after volley of poison arrows at the creature. But they fell far short of his high perch, and the strange bird’s head was thrown back in mockery at their futile efforts.

“The sun! He’s stealing the sun!” The soldiers wept and fell to their knees in mortal terror.

The next moment, the creature snapped close the box lid and the sun disappeared. Darkness fell upon Xanadu for the first time in half a century, and like people struck blind in their sleep, everyone in the palace rose howling from their beds.

The carved willow-screens in the palace were broken up with axes to be used as torches; branches were hacked from trees in the throne-room and bonfires built, there in the mystical pleasure-dome, to fight off the darkness. But however large it was built, its light was paltry beside that of the sun. The commotion, of course, woke everybody in the caravan.

“What’s going on?” said Hero.

“The dome,” said Malachi in prophetic tones, a sheet wrapped around him like a toga. “The dome is architecturally unsound and has cracked like a dropped egg.”

“No!” said Mr. Bacchus. “It’s not the dome. Look around!

We lie in darkness! The sun has gone. I suggest we proceed to the throne-room forthwith.”

They made their way through the crowds of panicking people, trying to discover from one fleeing figure or another who had perpetrated the theft of the sun. But none would answer, for the catastrophe had left them dumb with fear, until in his haste, a serving boy tripped over Malachi’s tail. Before he could be up and away, Hero had him in a vice-like grip.

“Boy,” he said. “What do you know?”

“The Princess,” the boy stammered.

“What about her?” said Hero.

“Gone,” said the boy. “He stole the sun and in the darkness stole her too.”

“Who stole them?” demanded Bacchus.

“Him,” said the boy.

“Who? Speak up, boy!” boomed Mr. Bacchus.

“In the caves,” the boy replied. “He lives in the caves, and he’s half-bird and half-man.”

Then he bit Hero’s hand, and, having been dropped, darted away between Bathsheba’s legs, and was away into the crowd.

“Half-bird, half-man,” repeated Malachi, drawing his toga higher around him.

“Anthropomorphic nonsense!”

Just then a gong sounded in the great dome, and the crowd ceased their hysterical flight, and began instead to make their way towards the throne-room, murmuring.

There, the Khan addressed them all, his face older and more sorrowful in the flickering torchlight. “Creatures of Xanadu,” he said. “The Princess has been stolen from her room in the night, and the sun from the dome. We all know by whom.”

“I don’t,” said Malachi.

“Sssssh,” hissed Bacchus.

“It’s no use saying I do when I don’t,” replied the crocodile, and made his way through the crowd to the throne. “I’m new here,” he said to Kublai Khan. “You’ll have to tell us about it.”

“Ah, the leviathan,” said the Khan.

“Call me Malachi,” said the crocodile.

“This is the truth of the matter,” said the Khan. “Some years ago, a woman fell in love with my brother, Kuyuk. But he refused to marry her. She swore, being, she said, a woman of power, to summon her familiars to metamorphose my brother into a bird. She lied of course; she had no such power. So she fashioned a mask in the form of a bird’s head, came to my brother in the middle of the night, and placed it upon his sleeping head. That dawn, when he woke and saw himself, he believed himself transformed, and fled into the caves below Xanadu. Tonight, he returned, and stole the sun to light the caves, and his daughter, who believes him dead, to light his heart. We are left doubly in darkness.”

“Then we must rescue her,” said a voice, and it was Angelo who strode through the crowd towards the throne.

“How?” said Kublai Khan. “The caves are measureless, and the river torrential. There is no way.”

“We’ll see,” said Angelo, and he turned to the rest of the Circus. “Hero, Malachi, Bathsheba, Domingo, Ophelia, Bacchus—are you with me?”

“Of course we are, my dear boy,” said Mr. Bacchus. “I was about to suggest the self-same plan myself.”

“I salute your bravery,” said the Khan. “Though sure the task is beyond even my finest generals. To battle, on an open plain, under the sun, that can be done. But in darkness, with only a flame to strike by, all is confusion.”

“We have always performed by torchlight,” replied Mr. Bacchus. “Darkness has its place, great Khan. It is where we may suppose the Mysteries dwell. Let us have shadow, then, to remind us of home.”

The Khan nodded, and clapped twice. Immediately there came a shrieking of ill-oiled chains, and in the floor of the throne-room a trapdoor appeared, revealing a stairway that sank down into the entrails of the earth.

“Fare thee well,” said the Khan, and he bowed as deeply as he was able, in recognition of the company’s valour. Then the crowd parted, like the Red Sea, and they made their way to the maw of the earth.

Angelo stood for a moment on the top step, until the light came into his eyes, and then led the way down into the caves, illuminating the way before them.

Indeed they were measureless, the caves below Xanadu. Measureless and treacherous. The steps, which had been cut into the ice, were slippery with slime, and the darkness forever danced around Angelo’s eyes, threatening to extinguish them.

Only Malachi was enjoying the journey, chiefly because of the water that dripped from the roof. For, unknown to the great Khans, the measureless caves were melting, and, in some future age, would collapse, pitching all the glory of Xanadu into the Abyss.

Deeper and deeper Angelo led the heroes, the roar of the river Alph growing louder in their heads all the time, until the air shook with sound. To left and right, like the pillars of ancient temples rose the bones of fabulous beasts, the Mantichora, the Shrike and the Baiste-na-scoghaigh, who had battled to their deaths in the measureless caves. At length, they stepped out into a cavern so large that they could discern no walls, and there, by the dim light of Angelo’s eyes, they saw the great river itself, white with the fury of its majesty, as it rushed to throw itself endlessly into the open air, and to fall away into the sunless cavern below. To trespass further into the caves, they would have to cross the river, and the only means was a bridge of rotting wood.

“I’ll go first,” volunteered Bathsheba. “I’m the lightest and an acrobat,” and she began to edge across the rotting bridge. She was only about half way across, however, when, on the other side of the river an awful figure appeared. It was Kuyuk, the Khan’s brother, dressed in his filthied ceremonial robes, the bird-mask upon his head. The Princess was beside him, and when her eyes alighted on the company and upon Angelo’s especially, she ran to the bridge. But her father was there before her, and with an inhuman screech he seized the rotting planks and began to tear at them.

“Bathsheba,” everyone yelled in unison. “Look out!” The orang-outang heeded the warning. In a moment she had bounded back along the bridge to the safety of the bank, just as Kuyuk, with one heave, sent the decaying planks tumbling into the Alph – where they were swiftly carried off by the roaring water. Now there was no way across the river, and with a cry of triumph, the Khan’s brother picked up his daughter in his arms and disappeared into the caves once more.

“What do we do?” asked Ophelia.

“Simple,” said Malachi, throwing off his sheet. “Ophelia, do you have your trapeze wire with you?”

“Of course,” said Ophelia. “How else can I practice?” And she dragged the wire from her pockets with a welter of dead flowers.

“Hero,” said Malachi, taking complete command of the situation. “Take one end of the wire and hold on for Aten’s sake.”

“What are you going to do?” said Domingo.

“The Nile runs far faster than this sluggish trickle,” said Malachi. “It will be simplicity itself to swim across.” With that he scuttled down the bank into the icy water, the other end of the trapeze wire held fast in his teeth, and disappeared. The river swept on, irrevocably, and for a long while there was no sign of Malachi. After a few minutes everyone began to suspect that the current or the bitter cold had overcome him and that he had been swept down the river to the waterfall. Perhaps, even now, they thought, he is swimming in the sunless sea, lost and boast-less. Then, when it seemed certain he would never be seen in this world again, he appeared on the other side of the river, and scaled the muddy bank. He then proceeded to tie the wire to a vast rib-bone that rose from the ice. Once it was made secure, Hero took the strain and Ophelia walked across, followed by Bathsheba. Both of them were used to heights, and the crossing was quite easy.

“Well, that’s three,” said Mr. Bacchus. “But I really can’t cross myself, because, to be honest, my feet aren’t big enough.”

“I can cross,” said Domingo. “After all, I can balance on my ball with no trouble.”

“Go on then, my boy,” said Mr. Bacchus, and inch by inch Domingo began to cross the river.

Angelo watched intently. “I must go too,” he said when the clown had crossed.

“No heroism, dear boy,” said Mr. Bacchus. “You’re not a tight rope walker, and it takes years of practice.”

“But I love her,” said Angelo.

“And will you love her still, as you are swept down-river to your doom?” said Bacchus. “Or when they dredge you from the coral at the bottom of the sunless sea?”

“I shall always love her,” said Angelo passionately, and before

Mr. Bacchus could prevent him, he had his bare feet on the wire, and was swaying back and forth dramatically. The river seemed to hush in expectancy of a victim, swirling and eddying beneath him, and throwing up columns of spray to snatch him down.

Suddenly, he slipped, and a moment later was dangling, like a droplet from a thread, above the river. All he could do was edge along the wire, hand over hand, though his palms became bloody and the water swelled up to pull at his feet. Every moment it seemed he would slip again and that this time the eager river would claim him for the chasm and the sunless sea beyond. But, after an age of breathless moments, he reached the other side. Everyone applauded, and he bowed and laughed, despite his bleeding hands.