The Library of Forgotten Books (8 page)

At first Anton sought only the immediate pleasures of the body. Over time, as they met weekly in the room on the top floor of the Hotel Du Cirque, Anton discovered that beneath Eliana’s childish air were hidden depths. Often she would ask him to explain some finer point of gratificationist philosophy, and her questions were unusually probing. She could grasp the philosophy’s consequences quickly, and constantly surprised him with her acumen. “So in the pursuit of immediate gratification, you’re prepared to risk long-term distress,” she said.

“Tomorrow we may be dead, and then what was the deferral of our desires for?” he said.

“But, perhaps we might also need to consider the terrible possibility that we may live another fifty years,” she said.

“Another fifty years of this!” He pulled her close so he could feel her breasts against him. She laughed.

One week, Lefebvre headed on business to the great monolithic city Varenis. Anton and Eliana arranged to meet for the afternoon. Anton was looking forward to a languorous lovemaking session, where the long hours would stretch like eternity itself. He imagined Eliana’s head thrown back, her mouth opening and closing in some counterpoint to the rest of her body. As he thought of it, his heart leaped.

It was with some surprise that, when he arrived at the hotel, he found a carriage was waiting at the front.

“Get in,” whispered Eliana.

Uncertain, Anton stepped up into the carriage and it took off, rattling along the cobblestones. Eliana leaned back on the seat opposite him and smiled knowingly.

Despite an almost overwhelming urge to ask her about their destination, Anton sat back in his own seat and looked through the window at Caeli-Amur. At first he thought they were headed to the massive Arena that sat at the base of the southern headland. But they passed it by, and it was empty on this afternoon. Instead they climbed the headland and passed through the southern gate of Caeli-Amur towards the water-parks and gardens that lay to the south. Though officially under the province of House Arbor, they were considered a neutral zone, where any of the House’s officiates could promenade in safety. Anton had never visited them. He was strictly a citizen of the city. Like many philosopher-assassins, he had grown up among his caste. His father had died when Anton was young and he had spent much of his childhood strapped to his mother’s back, his eyes calmly taking in events as she continued to fight in the internecine wars between the Houses. Murder, intrigue, theory—Anton was born into them.

When they arrived at the gardens, they passed through a great cast-iron gate imprinted with images of the goddess Pandae, crying alone in her boat on a great flat ocean. The carriage continued along the path, speckled sunlight falling between the trees. Colours leaped out at Anton: purples and yellows and oranges of flowers, the deep green of the grass, the sparkling blue of the canals that criss-crossed the gardens. Statues of gods and heroes stood sternly on little hillocks, or in semi-hidden arbours.

“Is it true that the statues in the gardens move around at night, that the gardens are filled with spirits?” Anton asked.

“Stay with me and you’ll survive,” teased Eliana.

Eventually they crossed a long bridge that led to an island in the middle of the lake. Among a copse of trees a great blanket was laid down, and on it were spread fruits and dried meats, cake-breads and flagons of liqueurs.

They stepped from the carriage, which then rattled away, leaving them alone with the feast.

“Who
are
you?” said Anton, half-joking, half in wonderment.

Eliana sat delicately on the blanket and her face became serious. “Who am I?” She seemed troubled by the question. “My father is a fisherman. My mother sells the fish at the markets, fixes the nets. It’s a poor life, but an honest one. One day, I was helping my mother at the market stall, and the Director came out of the Opera building. He walked over and spoke to me briefly. He invited me to one of his balls. My parents were so proud when the Director proposed to me. I knew I didn’t love him, but the look in their eyes! There were tears in them, and the Director even came to talk to my father about it. ‘As an equal,’ my father said. ‘He spoke to me as if we were equals.’ He was so pleased. It was such an opportunity—I couldn’t let them down. So that’s it: I’m just some poor girl the Director discovered down near the docks.”

“You’re not just that.”

After they had eaten, they sat looking out over the lake to the rest of the garden. Beneath the water moved fish and eels.

“Close your eyes, I have something for you,” said Eliana.

Anton smiled and closed his eyes. He felt her hand on his, pulling his fingers apart, and something small and heavy dropped into it.

He opened his eyes and there lay a heavy flat-topped silver ring with intricate carvings on it. He peered at it more closely. The carvings were of a labyrinth, small and delicate.

Eliana held her hand out. “I have one also, though I’ll keep mine hidden. Life is a maze, isn’t it? These are to symbolise that we have found our way to...something.”

Anton took Eliana’s hand in his, cupping the two rings in the space between their palms. He looked over the lake again. He felt a warmth in his body that he’d never experienced before, flowing from his heart outwards. He wondered at it, and searched for the words to describe it. It was an entirely
new
form of pleasure. One he hadn’t before experienced. Contentment—that’s what it was—a kind of wholeness, a feeling that everything was in its right place.

After a moment, he turned rapidly and pushed Eliana onto her back. As he fell upon her she laughed. “My dress!”

After that day, something changed between them. Each time they met at the Hotel, their lovemaking seemed more passionate, more intimate. Anton attended to Eliana’s every nuance: her tiny exhalations of breath, the way she turned slightly onto one side of her body, then onto the other, the rapid fluttering of her eye-lids, and then, finally, her half-muffled cry of his name. Through all this he held back, denying himself the momentary pleasures, until finally he seemed to reach a kind of transcendent bliss where he lost sense of his very body, and sense of hers, and somehow they left the material plane intertwined, surrounded by nothing but white light. When they finished, Anton, who considered himself a master of the amorous arts, lay speechless and breathless.

Eliana said, “How is it that you hold on for so long?”

He smiled and said, “It’s an unusually cold winter this year, don’t you think?”

He expected one of her usual loving barbs: “You’re such a rascal” or “You’re cruel.” He liked the way she would play with him in that happy way, following the words with a light-hearted laugh.

Instead, Eliana started to cry.

He knew he should leave her there, as he had done many times to others, but the sight of her tears running down her cherubic cheeks, the way she brushed her hand across her small upturned nose, kept him pinned on the bed as if under some great weight. And now, as she said nothing and looked away, as if defeated, Anton felt something shift inside him—a tiny little pain that cut him somewhere deep.

“He’s going to find out,” she said.

“No, he won’t. He spends all his time in his office—you’ve said so yourself.”

“He’ll kill you. You know that. Or worse.”

“Neither of us is going to die. I’ve always been lucky. Things work out for me.”

“It will have to end, won’t it? We can’t go on together, you and me.”

To his own surprise, Anton found himself saying, “Perhaps we should run away. It’s not as if anyone would miss us.”

She looked at him with those ice-blue eyes that had first attracted him. Her face lost its sadness and was now amazed: her bloodshot eyes wide, her cheeks glistening after the tears. “He’ll hunt you down.”

“He’ll take another wife and he’ll find another philosopher-assassin.”

She threw herself onto him and pinned him on the bed. “You’re teasing me, you rascal.”

He looked up at those eyes, his own alight with mischief. “Eliana, would I do such a thing?”

“I...I...” She was flustered and her face reddened. She turned her head from side to side and he understood her, and the words she could not say.

Something shifted inside him again, and in that moment Anton was convinced that there would be nothing more natural or romantic than to run away with her to Varenis, or perhaps south to a little fishing village where they could finally live in peace away from the internecine struggles of the Houses.

“Just say the words,” she whispered to him, closing her eyes as if she were praying. “I can’t bear this life any longer.”

“Bring your things next week and we’ll run away. We’ll go south to a fishing village.”

Later, as he slipped out of the rear door of Hotel du Cirque into the dark alleyway, he felt confused. He had been wrong to give in to the romance of the moment. No fishing village could ever hold him, just as he could never limit himself to one woman—he was not a gratificationist for nothing. Now he would have to break it off with her and he hoped that Eliana wouldn’t burn her bridges with Lefebvre as she left him. That would be disaster. Their affair would be unveiled and all would come apart.

Wrapped up in these thoughts, he was only vaguely aware of a figure standing at the other end of the alley. He cut through the winding cobblestoned ways towards the white cliffs, and back towards his apartment. A few minutes later he stopped. He kicked himself. This affair was ruining his instincts. There had been something suspicious about the figure, and he had simply passed by. Something about its presence disturbed him, like a dream half-remembered in the morning, shadowy and unreal.

To avoid thinking about Eliana, Anton gorged on Lika-flowers, so the days became instants of kaleidoscopic beauty where he found himself in the endless now, each moment perfect and whole. The world seemed filled with luminous truth and incandescent beauty. When these effects lifted, he snorted uderri-powder and rampaged through the nights fighting and drinking, waking in the morning bloodied and bruised, his memories of the night before mostly gone, his head pounding, yet his disposition happy enough.

The day before he was to meet Eliana, Anton stopped at the
La Tazia
café, drank two shots of black coffee and ate spiced fruit for breakfast.

Pehzi, the wizened old café owner, passed Anton a message from his former lover, Madame Demoul. Anton tore it up without reading it and left it on the table in front of him. Shortly afterwards a slight and effeminate message-boy entered the café and passed Anton a second letter, this one from Director Lefebvre. He was to come to the House Arbor Palace.

“God, everyone wants me!” said Anton cheerily to Pehzi. “Well they can all wait.”

“You’re too self-confident,” said Pehzi, picking up the sleek white cat that sprawled around the café as if it were the true owner. The cafés in Caeli-Amur were known for their cats—black, or silver, or speckled, and especially white—which lounged around in the sun or rubbed up against the citizens’ legs.

Anton laughed and popped a piece of melon into his mouth.

“There’s a war on, you know,” said Pehzi, still holding the cat, its rear legs hanging placidly down. “Anyway, it’s not my job to look after you.” That week the cafés along the cliffs had been filled with stories of the increasingly vicious actions between House Arbor and House Technis—broken agreements, assassinations, intrigues and machinations, secrets stolen—while House Marin circled in the background like a carrion bird waiting for the spoils.

Pehzi believed that the wars were cyclical and never-ending, and thus ultimately farcical, like three friends who every week drank joyously together, only to end up fighting clumsily in the streets before heading home to repeat it all a week later.

Anton looked out of the café’s window, across the open sea beyond. “There’s sun falling on the water. There’s coffee and fruit. There are pretty girls passing through the markets in the square. And you are worried about a war?”

“You may not care about the war, but the war cares about you.”

Anton left the café and made his way south-west, around Caeli-Amur’s white cliffs, up to the oldest and wealthiest sections of the city, away from the steam-trams, to where black-caparisoned horses pulled carriages and lines of bulb-trees followed the curve of the streets.

Like Lefebvre’s mansion, House Arbor’s Palace was surrounded by
Toxicodendron
Didion
, creeping thickly over the bluestone walls, its leaves gently undulating in the sun, ever wary for prey that might stumble into it. The archway was guarded, but Anton was allowed to pass and continue on. At several points the path skirted great circular fountains with magnificent statues of the gods: Aya in struggle against the others, Pandae crying out alone on her boat surrounded by the surging sea, Demidae holding up his great three-barrelled lightning rod to the sky. Far away Anton could hear the soft wailing of tear-flowers and he resisted the urge to leave the path and find them.

The stately palace was an imposing and yet delicate construction. From the path, the first thing that struck the viewer was the high windows and above them the grand balconies onto which double-doors opened. But as visitors approached the palace, they noticed more the long five-storey wing that was held up by arches over a lake like a massive bridge enclosed by walls and roofs. Doormen in their ridiculous Arbor uniforms (with tails that flapped behind them limply in the breeze) stood in the surrounding gardens. They took no notice of Anton, who passed into the wide marble-floored halls, chandeliers hanging over them that in the night gleamed like clusters of shining stars.

Lefebvre sat in his spacious office, light shining through the wide windows to his left, Jean-Paul standing behind him. “Always late,” said Lefebvre, shaking his head. “If you weren’t my most trusted agent, I’d take you to the dungeons myself.”

“But you love me like a son,” joked Anton, slouching into a chair.

Lefebvre closed his eyes as if he were suffering. His voice grew serious then, and for the first time Anton noticed tiny lines of worry appear between Lefebvre’s eyebrows. “I have a task that is not only of importance to the House, but is of personal importance to me—a task that the other Directors must know nothing about. You remember my wife?”