The Courage Consort (27 page)

Without needing to confer on the decision, the twins helped each other unbuckle their mother's body from the sledge and carry her into the Guhiynui house. Reverently they inserted her into the bed, wrapping the seal skins around her, smoothing her penumbra of wet hair evenly over the pillow.

'Cuckoo!' carolled the clock, once only. It had used twelve of its cries to call them here, and must begin again.

After consulting the universe, the Fahrenheit twins decided they would go straight home, rather than visiting the Guhiynui settlement. There was, they felt, something not right about prolonging their adventures when their mission was accomplished, and the dogs seemed desperately keen to turn back. Moreover, there was a long, comfortable sledge free now, in which Tainto'lilith and Marko'cain could slumber the miles away, basking in the sun while the huskies pulled their lighter load homewards.

So that is what they did.

In one of her rare outbursts of nostalgic storytelling, Una Fahrenheit had once told her children of the express trains which carried people across the borders of deepest Europe, whisking them from country to country without anyone having to give a thought to the steering. People could play card games, read books, or even sleep, and the trains would continue unerringly, drawn to the destination as if on a tight string. This was how the long journey back to civilisation felt to the Fahrenheit twins.

When at last they sensed themselves coming to rest in a warm, dark place, it might have been one of those fabled tunnels leading into a railway station, the like of which they had struggled to describe for the purposes of the Book of Knowledge. It was, in fact, the huskies' heated bunker, their concrete kennel, nestled behind the generator. The exhausted dogs were putting themselves to bed without even waiting to be untethered from their harnesses.

Tainto'lilith and Marko'cain prised themselves out of the sledge like a couple of imperfectly defrosted fish, falling onto the seagrass matting of the kennel floor. They were, they realised, half dead. Only their instinctive huddling together, nuzzling their faces into each other's furry hoods and locking torso to torso, had saved them from sleeping themselves into frostbitten oblivion.

'Oh, oh, oh,' they said, crawling dizzily on their hands and knees on opposite sides of their mother's bier. Snuffel Junior lifted his head from his boneless slump, momentarily concerned for the twins' welfare. Then he nuzzled back to sleep. They would live.

Boris Fahrenheit was thunderstruck at the twins' return. A rowdy influx of polar bears would have surprised him less than the quiet reentry of his two small children, padding into the kitchen in their damp and filthy socks. He looked from one twin to the other, noting the trickly red stains on their chins and the breasts of their jumpsuits, the halo of animal hair all over them, the pink irritations in their luminous eyes.

'It's done, father,' said Tainto'lilith reassuringly, but the old man's grey complexion only went greyer.

Perhaps his discomposure was caused by a difficulty in juggling two social challenges: that of welcoming his children home and that of entertaining a visitor. For Boris Fahrenheit was not a social creature, and the matronly looking woman who was sitting at the breakfast table, tea in hand, was surely the first visitor they had ever had.

'Oh, Bumsie!' she cried, apparently addressing Boris. 'You didn't tell me you had children!'

Boris's jaw was shuddering like an abused motor.

'I—I was keeping it a surprise,' he stammered. 'They're no trouble, really. They're basically … self-caring.'

'Oh, but they're adorable!' exclaimed the woman, springing up from her breakfast stool. She was a small thing, hardly taller than the twins themselves, and she had a fetchingly dishevelled abundance of blond hair. Her skin was so tanned it was almost caramel, contrasting vividly with her white bathrobe. Her face was uncannily similar to one of the many dolls their mother had given them over the years, an impish Scandinavian poppet intended (according to the Book) to dangle from the ceilings of automobiles. She radiated nurture.

'This is Miss Kristensen,' croaked Boris Fahrenheit. 'She will be living with us from now on.'

'How do you do,' said the twins in unison, resorting to the language of the stories they had read. It seemed to be what was wanted.

'Oh, very
well!
' beamed Miss Kristensen, extending her hands in friendship, one for each twin.

Hunched behind the breakfast table, Boris Fahrenheit exposed all his teeth in a startlingly unbecoming smile.

The twins ate themselves sick on a lavish meal prepared for them by Miss Kristensen. They were too weak to sit at the table with their father, so she fed them on the floor, where they helped themselves to a cornucopia of steaming protein and starchy tidbits.

'You poor, poor things,' she sang, bending down to serve them milk, not from the ample bosom that swung inside her bathrobe, but from colourful little cartons manufactured in Canada. Before they could thank her politely, she was back at the stove.

Miss Kristensen was in fact a dynamo of culinary energy, chattering in the steam of her own high-speed cooking, flipping eggs without even looking at them, happily bonding with all the utensils Una Fahrenheit had never used.

'Here you are, you secretive rogue,' she said, setting a plate of sizzling cutlets in front of the bewildered Boris. Then, in a raucous whisper, 'I'm dying to know what else you never mentioned in your letters!'

Tainto'lilith and Marko'cain excused themselves to go off and vomit.

Hidden away in their own bedroom, feverish, hunched over a big metal bowl, they puked all the colours of the rainbow for what seemed like an age.

'We smell bad,' observed Marko'cain, during a little rest between exertions.

'It's all the tomato,' sighed Tainto'lilith.

More than anything, they were desperate for a bath. This in itself was not a problem: they were well accustomed to bathing themselves, and washing their clothes, too. But unspoken between them was a bewildering new anxiety: the possibility of Miss Kristensen volunteering to bathe them. The thought was terrifying—more taboo, somehow, than anything they had yet encountered. So, stealthily, they spirited themselves into the bathroom, locked the door, and filled the tub.

Whoops of feminine laughter and growls of paternal caution echoed through the house as the naked twins stepped into the water together.

'This is not our home anymore,' said Tainto'lilith, facing her brother across the soily, steamy broth shimmering between them. 'Things have changed.'

Marko'cain nodded in agreement.

'We have changed, too,' he said.

They glanced at each other, surreptitiously checking whether the threatened teats and beard were sprouting yet, but their outward appearances were still comfortingly identical. It was their insides that would never be the same. Something had happened to them, out there in the wilderness.

'I am angry at father,' mentioned Marko'cain, saucing himself with shampoo. 'Are you?'

'Very angry.'

'Do you think it would make us feel any better if we killed him?'

'I think we should just run away,' said Tainto'lilith. 'But with proper food, this time.'

Marko'cain ducked his head into the water, allowing his sister to paw the suds out of his scalp. When he surfaced, he said, 'Perhaps we should kill father,
then
run away.'

'What about Miss Kristensen?'

'Kill her as well,' added Marko'cain glibly.

'We don't mean her any harm, do we?'

'Perhaps she
told
father to get rid of us,' suggested Marko'-cain. 'So she could come and live with him.'

Tainto'lilith sighed: a deep, doleful exhalation of regret.

'I wish our eyes had not been opened to these things,' she said. 'The world was so much nicer before.'

Frowning, wedging her head between the taps, she made her very best effort to tell guile apart from innocence. Hot water droplets pattered onto her right shoulder, and cold onto her left.

'She honestly seemed surprised to see us,' she reflected. 'To see that there was such a
thing
as us, I mean.'

'Perhaps she was just play-acting,' said Marko'cain.

'I don't believe so.'

'All right, then, we'll leave her be, and just kill him.' There was a strange new tone in the boy's voice, a cocky impatience, as if the choice between life and death was too straightforward a matter to waste much discussion on. This, too, made Tainto'lilith sad. She racked her brains for a way to save her father, that poor old baby who was, after all, helpless without a woman.

'If we kill father,' she said, 'Miss Kristensen might get killed as well, without us wanting it.'

'How?' The threat of complication was, as Tainto'lilith had hoped, putting a wrinkle on his brow.

'She might throw herself in front of him,' she said. 'Like the brave little squaw in
Sheriff Flintlock and the Rustlers.
'

'One of us could kill father,' suggested Marko'cain, 'while the other engaged Miss Kristensen in conversation.'

'That seems terribly unkind,' sighed Tainto'lilith, glimpsing a long lifetime ahead of her of keeping her brother's inclinations in check. 'Especially since she is a visitor. I think we should just run away.'

'All right,' he said, standing up in the bath abruptly, a tutu of froth clinging to his midriff. 'But not with the huskies.'

'On foot?' said Tainto'lilith.

'In the helicopter,' declared Marko'cain, clambering out, with such a swagger of purpose that it looked as if he might stride naked to the hangar.

'But we've never flown the helicopter,' protested Tainto'lilith, splashing out of the bath herself.

'We've read the book,' her brother said airily, meaning the pilot's manual they'd often played with when it was too snowy to go outside.

'It's not the same.'

'Of course it isn't. But there is a connection.'

Wrapping towels around themselves, the twins walked to the laundry, where the massive front-loader washing machine was almost finished washing their jumpsuits. The house had gone all quiet, apart from the mechanised sloshing of the water. Boris Fahrenheit and Miss Kristensen had made peace with each other, it seemed.

'Where would we go?' said Tainto'lilith.

'A green place,' enthused her brother. 'Europe. Canada. Russia. Gre-e-e-enland.'

'The names are good,' admitted Tainto'lilith. Then suddenly she started weeping, a stream of hot tears rolling down her face, a lost and frightened look in her eyes.

Marko'cain, catching sight of her distress, was shocked. She had never wept without him before, particularly not in a situation where he himself could imagine nothing to weep about. Awkwardly, he patted her trembling shoulders. Now he, too, glimpsed a lifetime ahead of him, of trying, and failing, to comfort his sister in her secret sorrows.

'We might get to see a tree,' he said, encouragingly. 'And all the other things that mother used to talk about.'

Tainto'lilith nodded, unable to speak, the tears still flowing down her cheeks. She would be all right in a moment. Behind the big glass porthole in the washing machine, their clothing had begun to spin, an inextricable, mesmerising ring of embroidered pelts. Soon they would be able to put it on again and cover their nakedness.

And yes, her brother was right, they had so much to look forward to, in the big wide world down below. The Book of Knowledge had a lot of blank pages.

M
Y THANKS, AS EVER,
to Eva Youren for her wise advice during the writing of these three novellas and especially for her help in creating the characters of Ben and Dagmar in 'The Courage Consort.'

'The One Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps' owes its existence to Keith Wilson, who commissioned me to write a story set around the English Heritage dig at Whitby Abbey.

No animals were harmed or coerced in the making of these three tales.

—M
ICHEL
F
ABER

March 2004