The Promise of the Child (10 page)

Iro

Sotiris's feet lead him treacherously back to the port. A half-hour walk at least, but he's there in an instant, just in time to see the men disembark from the boat. One of them has a car waiting and gets in without waving goodbye. It moves quickly away from the curb into the empty midday street, carrying a scent of baked rubber. Sotiris lets his gaze follow the dwindling vehicle, a battered, antique solar Citroën that twinkles in the sun, wondering where it's going in such a hurry. He looks back to see his sister Iro taking the skipper's hand as she walks along the wobbly gangplank. He smiles, a broad grin that might just stretch his face in two, knowing that for some reason, in some long-lost where-and-when that eludes him, he has missed her very much. Perhaps he has been on the island a long time, but that doesn't feel quite like the truth.

Iro, wearing an elegant red summer dress from some London high-street label, sees him, her smile faltering as she glances back at the boat. She has brought a guest. Sotiris continues to watch her, feeling as if he hasn't seen her in a lifetime. At last he looks to the boat. A tall, slightly stooped man is being helped from the ferry, one long leg steadying itself on the slimy stone. He is clothed in Amaranthine style but the drapery is opaque, dark swathes that the light never touches. Sotiris stares, not realising that the two had ever met.

Maneker smiles at him. His old friend looks as he always has, gaunt-cheeked and long-featured, handsome like a well-bred whippet. His skin is coppery, the sun gleaming from the tip of his nose. The traitor Amaranthine grabs him in an embrace, and Sotiris looks over Maneker's shoulder at his sister once more, pleased simply that she has found the time to visit. Something nags his mind, the memory of a presence he felt sure was on that boat. He looks back, but the boat is empty now, all the passengers departed.

He takes Maneker to his chapel. He's not sure why—it wouldn't be his first choice—but it's merely the place where he becomes aware. They both sit looking out at Kefalonia, hazy in the morning air, their legs dangling over the warm rock wall.

“I was sorry to hear about Iro.”

Sotiris nods, sure for a moment that he has just seen her. He looks back to the view, the thousands of deaths registering from somewhere, some
when
. “They tell me she did not suffer.”

“Still.”

He looks briefly at Maneker's profile, then back at the large island in the distance. “Your timing was good.”

“Was it?”

“Sending Stone to escort me out …”

Maneker lets the sentence hang there for a while. “Are you grateful?” he asks at last, swinging his long legs.

“Yes.”

“Enough to wish to repay me in some way?”

Sotiris knows what Maneker wants. He feels his body stir somewhere beyond where they are, all around them, as if the sea and sky and islands are all contained within a racing molecule deep inside himself.

“You want my cooperation.”

“Only what I'd ask from a friend.”

He nods. “Then of course.”

Maneker grins and drapes an arm around Sotiris's shoulders. “All is well, then.” His smile falters. “As well as can be, anyway. You must go to your sister, mourn her.”

“Yes.”

“Then come and be with us in the First—what do you say?”

He watches the man waiting for the ferry, their farewells completed amid a small crowd of impassive island commuters. All of it is a construct of his mind, he has no doubt, but still Sotiris watches Maneker. The man who used to be his friend stands patiently, not talking to anyone, thin hands stuffed into unseen pockets. The ferry is a ponderous white smear churning the harbour water as it turns, ready to disgorge arriving Kefalonia traffic.

He wonders briefly what will happen once the ferry passes out of sight, if Maneker and all those people will simply fade, no longer needed in the canvas of his dreams. He looks at the islanders as he walks away. Their faces aren't clear. He searches out Maneker again, finding the man watching him, unsmiling.

When he returns to the house she is there, unpacking her suitcases. He looks at what little she has brought with her for a two-week stay on the island; they will make their way to the small supermarket later to buy supplies—bread, tomatoes and oil, halloumi cheese, rich red wine in plastic bottles. He remembers that they have one less now for dinner, but the name of the departed guest is suddenly a mystery to him.

They walk side by side to the supermarket along the narrow road between the white cuboid buildings. He knows she has something to tell him.

“What is it?” Sotiris asks, sure that she will say she is pregnant. Briefly, absurdly, he worries that she won't let him buy wine for their dinner.

“I have a guest coming to stay with us,” Iro says, not looking at him. “I hope you don't mind.”

He is about to say that she has just brought a guest, but that isn't true—she stepped off the boat alone. “Who have you invited?”

“A man. You've met him once before, in London.” She glances at him shyly. “It's not what you think. His name is Aaron.”

“Aaron?” He tries to recall the name, but he knows a few Aarons. “Did he come to your house in Holland Park?”

“Yes, just the once. He's holidaying in Venice and wrote to say he would try and catch the morning ferry. He should be here tomorrow evening.”

Sotiris takes his mind back to the days he spent in West London, seeing the sights while Iro was at work, but it is difficult to recall the details. “He's a bit older than you—that Aaron? Some sort of … diplomat?”

“That's right. I said he could stay for the week—he was very excited to see Ithaka.”

Sotiris looks at her. “All right. So he's to have his own room?”

“I told you, it's not like that.”

He laughs. “Fine, I won't ask. Just don't get your heart broken—it would ruin my holiday.”

They make their way back to the house with a shopping bag each, sweating as they climb the hill. He thinks about the man who will come to stay but can't remember his face. Iro hadn't had many boyfriends that he knew of, but the ones he had met were invariably older, sedentary professionals she'd met through her contacts at the newspaper.

Sotiris opens the fridge, taking a beer as he hears his sister turn on the rusty shower. He hopes the man she is inviting isn't easily bored, for there's little to do on the island that doesn't involve eating, sleeping or swimming.

He considers this
Aaron
as he steps out onto the veranda. He was English, his accent pure cut-glass, but something in his voice and mannerisms suggested that Aaron had been born abroad, perhaps on the Continent. Sotiris drains his beer and sits in one of the plastic chairs to look out at the port, wondering why the man's heritage should interest him. He thought at the time, when he met him in London, that Aaron had been leading his sister on. She had been falling in love with him even then. He hopes she knows what she's doing, inviting him here.

Someone strolling along the harbour-side catches his attention and he sits up, placing the empty bottle on the table. Sotiris narrows his eyes, feeling the world move again. The figure is far away, one of many walking or driving sputtering scooters along the quay where the yachts and fishing boats are moored, but he sees this one clearly enough. It is small, like a dwarf, its skin a brilliant white. It looks up at him, little pointed ears pricked, and waves.

Prism
, he thinks, trying to find a place for that apparently familiar word. He wants to stand and shout, to warn the people walking past the creature that it is not safe. The tiny person—more primate than human—should not be here, on his little island.

Suddenly he remembers, as the breeze ruffles his collar with a sound like a sigh, that his sister is dead.

Threen

Corphuso thought he could see a star. The tiny point of light was almost too faint to notice, wavering as if glimpsed through a column of rising heat. It was the only source of light he could make out, enough to know that the trees didn't entirely obscure the deep valley where they had made their camp. As he watched it, another twinkle caught a nearby surface: the Threen sitting opposite him glancing up, the reflection of the starlight in its large round eyes. It had been watching him and now was looking to see what drew his attention. He'd thought perhaps it had gone back to the outskirts of the camp, having heard no sound around him for the last few minutes, but it had been there all along, inspecting him, close enough to reach out and touch.

Their night-sight was said to be better than any other Prism. It surely had to be in the dripping fungal rainforests that bordered the Light Line. There was no difference between day and night here in the foothills of the Hiobs, and all was silent but for the pattering of a gentle rain from the leaves. Long ago on the Old World, the ancestors of all the imported species here would have screeched and howled into the darkness; now they kept still—life in the black rainforest made its way in creeping, careful silence, or burrowed and hidden.

He watched the starlight glinting off the wetness of the thing's eye a second longer, and then it was gone. He listened, waiting until he thought he heard it move away before he let himself relax. The Threen were their guides here, it was true, called by ancient debts to the aid of their Amaranthine masters, but still he didn't like them. They spoke no Unified besides the most simple words, relying on a creole Zelioceti dialect with the Vulgar interpreter they had brought with them, and laughed glottal, high-pitched laughter if Voss—the Immortal who had accompanied him from the fortress at Nilmuth—ever tried to speak to them herself. There were originally eight Threen escorting the party of Vulgar over the Hiobs, though Corphuso suspected from the chatter whenever it was time to move again that more might have come through the forest to join the unseen group. Each day they climbed higher and higher into the mountains, the steepness of the ground the only suggestion that they might be ascending at all. He and the twenty Vulgar were connected by a rope tied around their left wrists to prevent someone from accidentally wandering off the forest trail. The Shell itself was secured inside a huge metal chest and dragged along behind them on a pallet.

Corphuso remembered watching it being packed away in the ruined fortress at Nilmuth, jealously directing the careful wrapping of the object, its twisted digestive tract of cast bronze sealed away for the delight of some new owner. The Amaranthine Voss had told him that the attack on Nilmuth was just the beginning. News of the import of his invention was already spreading across the Prism Investiture, attracting the attention of kingdoms that might do almost anything to secure the Shell for themselves. Corphuso's party were likely being followed through the black jungles of Port Obviado by any number of different hominid breeds, though the Threen scouts that brought up the rear were hazy in their details. He looked into the darkness, attempting to think rationally for a minute. They'd had a head start, setting off aboard a departing destroyer within a day of the failed attack on the fortress and breaking orbit near the cold equatorial port of Hrucho-Rash in a rusted Zelioceti Voidship. The Amaranthine herself had suggested they take the more well-travelled shipping lanes, slipping into the superluminal wake of a colossal bunk barge from Port Halstrom where they'd be almost impossible to spot.

The journey through the blackness was hard and tedious, but light was absolutely forbidden here. In his mind, Corphuso pictured their progress, guessing at the density of the forest by the feel of the trunks and the distant sound of the Threen ahead hacking through undergrowth. He called to mind the vague maps he had studied before landing here, tracing their zigzagging path through the foothills against what he could remember of the charts.

He'd first met the Threen at the hatch of the Voidship, the anaemic mint-greens of the forest illuminated briefly in the light from the hangar. Taller than their Prism second cousins the Vulgar, indeed almost as tall as an Amaranthine, the Threen looked like skinny, undernourished children. They had covered their wide, pale eyes with strips of cloth to protect them from the hangar lights and their mottled cream skin looked glossy, as if it would be slick to the touch. Corphuso had only found out later—after hearing their unsettling slurping sounds through the night—that they used their own saliva to bathe, licking themselves clean with long pink tongues. During the short introductions as the Shell was unloaded from the hold, Corphuso had time to notice that at least one of the Threen was quite obviously unwell, its skin jaundiced and blotchy. Certain races of Prism could become ill, unlike the Amaranthine or the Melius; overenthusiastic inbreeding had made pedigrees and mongrels of them, like the dogs of the Old World. Such misfortunes rarely affected the more civilised of the Vulgar, who could live well into their fifth century if the serendipity of wealth and title placed them safely above the grind of their society. But still disease scared him, especially in this dank, lightless place.

Corphuso closed his eyes, noticing no difference in sensation, and thought about sleeping. They would be moving again in less than three hours. The camp was dug into the side of a small earthen rise in the forest, damp tree-roots extending like buttresses to trip anyone who did not feel ahead. The smell of the makeshift latrines wafted across the camp with the light forest wind, and even now he could hear one of his Vulgar guards bumping into things as he made his way towards one of the holes.

Port Obviado had once been an Amaranthine world, a moon cowering almost permanently in the shadow of its parent planet in the former Solar Satrapy of Kapteyn's Star, many thousands of years ago. It was now held, like much of the system, by the Threen and their slave Prism, a dark place where no eyes could penetrate. The air here, thick with scents of urine, moss and earth, was heavier and stronger than that of some of the Vulgar kingdoms or the Old World, and Corphuso remembered as he sank into sleep some snippet of his education and the great mystery that had confronted the pre-Amaranthine conquest of the Firmament.