The Promise of the Child (15 page)

Lycaste considered this as he worked on some furniture for the palace that night, humming as he painted the legs of a tiny chair with varnish. The same could perhaps be said of his model: how much did you have to take away before it ceased to be a house any more? The roof? One entire wall? He sat back and looked at it all, taking in the groups of figures, the tapestries that he'd sewn specially with a tiny needle, the open, vacant chambers closer to the top. What was Drimys now, if so much of him had been removed?

He turned the chair in his fingers, applying the brush-tip to the next leg, lost in thought. He'd finally found time to work but was doing everything clumsily, rushing things to make up for all the distractions. It wasn't proving as relaxing as he'd hoped it would be.

“Where will that go?” asked Pentas. She was determined to help in some way, even though she was making mistakes that he would have to fix later. Lycaste knew she didn't really find his project interesting—might even have considered such pursuits childish if they were being undertaken by anyone she thought less of—and that she was only helping out so they could spend time together. He supposed he should be grateful but would rather have been left in peace. He didn't need help. It wouldn't be his any more if people helped.

He pointed at the top floor without turning around. “With the table I'm making.” He glanced at her briefly; there had been no further kisses since the night in his tower and he was beginning to worry that the longer they left it before the next, the harder such things would be for him to repeat. He wasn't even sure he could remember how to do it.

She met his gaze, smiling uncertainly. “What?”

He steeled himself, trying to think of something to say beforehand, but nothing came. He leaned forward, placing his brush down with a trembling hand.

Pentas looked away quickly before his lips could touch her. She pushed her chair back a little, returning her attention to the palace as if it was the most fascinating thing in the world.

“Lycaste,” she began, white eyes straying to the floor, “I … I'm sorry. I didn't mean to, before.” She looked at him at last. “I was frightened I'd lose you.”

He picked up his brush quickly, as if preparing to go back to work. Anything to cover his embarrassment. “Lose me?”

Her gaze went back to the palace. “You're my dearest friend here. I shouldn't have given you hope—Eranthis was right.”

“You pretended to love me,” he said, touching the tip of the brush to the chair leg again.

Pentas dropped her head with a shrug. “I love you as a friend.”

Lycaste looked into her white eyes as they lifted again. “A friend.”

When she had gone, he glanced to the door as if searching for any last trace of her that would imply he wasn't totally alone, not yet. The birds, often still awake at this time of night, had until recently lived in small rooms in the towers, their childish possessions cluttering the stairways and landings. When summer came around, they moved below ground where it was cooler, staying in the grander quarters he seldom visited. The tower was his again, silent and empty.

Memories Returned

The café is only moderately crowded, an evening festival in the hills occupying most of the locals. The crowd he walks through is full of tourists for the most part, rich Athenians, sunburned German families. Sotiris takes a seat at an empty table, checking around him carefully, not quite sure what he's looking for.

He studies the drinks menu, sun-bleached photographs of bottles on laminated card, thinking of ordering wine. As he waits, he looks out to the water, calm as the pink evening descends, and searches for his distant chapel on its hill. The year is not what it appears, Sotiris knows that much, other memories returning languidly with each breath of wind across the port. He remembers, piece by piece: a dream within a dream.

Somewhere beyond where he sits, as if just behind the sky or hidden within the light on the water, the year is 14,647 AD. Humankind has changed, fractured,
Prismed
into a dozen breeds of fairy-tale grotesques, the chaos of expansion, war and ruin flinging humanity like bouncing sparks around the blackness of space. Man has been resculpted in a hundred different places, and the world as he knew it—
this
world—is gone for ever.

Sotiris takes a sip of his crisp wine, instantly feeling its effect.

When people—humans, good old-fashioned
Homo sapiens
—left the world as conquistadors, adventurers, slavers, industrialists and a thousand other things, they found the one thing they weren't expecting. They found nothing. Apparently only one fixed constant, one unbreakable physical law, would saturate the riot of interstellar history: the law of sterility. The heavens, so promising to earlier eyes, were empty of life. And not simply of anyone to talk to, or play a game of I-Spy with—no microbe, particle or strand of anything microscopically self-replicating was ever found that had not been carelessly trudged in on the soles of filthy boots. The phenomenon of life, as far as anyone could tell, was unique, a one-off, beginning and ending on the Old World.

One last tease of a hiccup in this law came during the tedious project of cataloguing Saturn's rings in the thirtieth century, when a school of mining rigs chanced upon the wrecked hulk of an unknown and impossibly strange craft, embedded and deep-frozen within one of the trillions of rocks that made up the grain of the spectacular rings. Analysis revealed a wonder, however disappointingly tied to Earth it might originally have been. Entombed in permanent shadow within the flamboyant structure were two occupants, their shocked faces frozen in a death that had occurred approximately seventy-nine million years before. They were theropods, more specifically a subspecies cross-breed of
Caudipteryx
and
Dromaeosaur
, starkly plumed in hues of blue-tinged silver and ebony, elegant white machine suits of staggering complexity encasing their shrivelled, eerie bodies. Of course it was exciting that members of a race of
dinosaur
—long and quite famously extinct—had apparently been clever enough to escape the tug of Earth, but they still weren't what everyone was hoping for: something truly from another world.

Denial was replaced, reasonably enough, by extraordinary vanity, followed by the triumphant rekindling of religious dependence. Theology became a science once again and God was searched for with a hunger that humankind, in all its earlier childish fervour, had never known. But there was no trace of him, her, it or them, either, and by then humanity was unrecognisable. Only the precious few Immortals—the Amaranthine—had not regressed into barbarism, though their enemies waited, circling, for the ever-dimming lights to go out.

*

Dusk has fallen, a sumptuous half-light shrouding the harbour. One or two stars have found their way through the depths of sky. He glances up at them, remembering again that they aren't real, that the world he sees around him is sealed like a bubble of air in an amber nugget. Sotiris looks down at himself in the gloom, peering at his reflection in the wine glass. He is perhaps in his mid-twenties, suggesting it is somewhere around 2180.

Someone is making him dream this.

The petrol engine of a scooter growls to a stop. Aaron, his hair wet, sits astride. He nods a greeting and kicks out the stand, leaning the scooter carefully as if he'd never parked one before. Lights are just starting to come on in the harbour, the window of the gelati shop across the street flickering.

“You've remembered now,” says Aaron matter-of-factly, taking a seat at the table.

“Yes, I think I have.” He drains his glass. “Iro's gone, isn't she?”

“For the time being.”

Sotiris looks at him, noting again the kindness in the man's eerily forgettable face. “What does that mean?”

Aaron picks up the bottle and pours himself a glass, inspecting it in the twilight. “We'll talk about that later. For now, it's just us two.”

Sotiris nods, aware that the dream will end soon enough. “All right.”

The man across from him studies his face for a while, spinning the glass deftly in his hand. It makes a sighing noise. “I have a proposition for you, Sotiris Gianakos.”

Sotiris smiles, safe in the knowledge that he is conversing with an element of himself, some schizophrenic by-product of living so long. “You are Maneker's hopeful new king, aren't you? The one everyone's so afraid of.”

Aaron scowls for a moment, the glass pausing in his hands. “You think me a trick of your mind.”

“Of course.”

He breathes out, the glass resuming its spin. Sotiris looks away to the dark water, hearing something slosh beneath the surface near the buoys. Suddenly he feels cold, a shudder passing through him. He looks back.

The putrefying corpse of some kind of animal sits where Aaron had been, staring at him with milky eyes peeled wide. Its body is bloated and yellow-black with decay, some kind of larvae wriggling in a hole around its torn nostril.

It bursts.

Sotiris woke screaming.

Thunder

They were dreams of extreme pressure, compressing and constricting Lycaste's skull without any sensation of pain, as if something huge had suddenly caught hold of him. In his dream, that danger had always been there, flitting at the edge of his vision, until without warning it had struck. He lay remembering the feeling as it dissipated, trying to stick the experience down before it left him entirely. Something other than the dream had woken him, but he had no idea what. He turned in the bed, recalling the shock of realising he'd seen the shapeless underwater monster in that colourful, sensory-laden nightmare so many times before without understanding what it was, and by then it had been too late.

Lycaste mulled over the night before, discarding the dream for the necessary space to think. Pentas was long gone, her scent taken with her so that only the sharp smell of his model paint remained in the room. He couldn't believe what she'd told him; couldn't believe that she was capable of such cruelty or that it was even true. She loved him, he was certain. It would simply take her time to admit it.

He stood and stretched in the main tower's spare bedchamber, watching through the open circular window as waves smoothed the pebbles down on the beach. There it was again, the knocking sound that had brought him from that horrible dream. He had a visitor.

Most of the local Province had already come to see Drimys in the last week, the headline news of the man's terrible injuries filtering faster than most local gossip. As Lycaste made his way down the tower steps, he wondered who might be so remote as to have only just heard. He reached the hallway, smoothing his hair quickly, and opened the door.

“Lycaste Cruenta Melius, good morning. Did I wake you?”

He blinked and looked down at the wizened, freakish form of Jotroffe on his doorstep. Only very strange people indeed bothered to use full names. He wondered how the hermit knew his. The shrunken little man—looking particularly unusual in the morning light—laid his crook against the wall and pointed to a covered basket on the front step. “For Drimys. I hear he did himself a mischief.”

Lycaste wasn't sure that what they'd been through could constitute a
mischief
, but he was at least glad the man had chosen a current topic of conversation for once. “That's very kind of you, Jotroffe. I shall see he gets it.”

Jotroffe cackled, exposing tiny square teeth in a small mouth nothing like Lycaste's own, and retrieved his stick. He pointed it vaguely to the sky, his small head turning this way and that as if in search of clouds. “I think the barometric pressure will be of interest today, worth keeping a record of.” He leaned on his stick, suddenly looking at Lycaste with great interest. “Do you own a barometer?”

Lycaste took the basket on the step, making sure to swing the door shut behind him in case the old bore made a dash for his kitchen. “I don't think so, Jotroffe.” He pointed at the basket. “Thank you, again, for the gift.”

Jotroffe nodded with a smile, regarding the basket briefly and then returning his attention to the sky. “It is possible to construct a fully functional barometer using a bottle, a hollow reed and a rubber balloon, among other things—the resulting readings are often quite fascinating. One of these days I must pop round and show you. In fact …” He began to rummage in the small, colourfully woven bag he wore over his shoulder, voice trailing off. “I believe I might have some of the necessary equipment about my person—”

“I'll have to consult my diary,” said Lycaste quickly, pushing the door open again to step back into his hallway. He kept his hand on the latch. “Do come again.”

Jotroffe lifted his cane, leaning its tip carefully against the door to prevent it from closing. Lycaste looked down, astounded.

They stared at each other.

“Be careful, Lycaste,” the strange man said. “Remember to be careful.”

“I … shall,” he stammered, watching as Jotroffe's stick came away from his door. The man smiled.

“Farewell, then,” Lycaste said, “and … thank you for the advice.” He closed the door slowly, waving, until the heavy latch
snicked
shut. When he was sure the old man had gone, he dumped the basket on the table and sat down, abruptly convinced that he had just been threatened in some way. He pulled the basket towards him and peered carefully inside, half expecting to find something made from toenails or armpit hair, instead lifting out a fine-smelling cake. Stored in the bottom of the basket beneath the cake were two sealed amber jars of quince jam and a ring book. Lycaste examined the book briefly and sniffed the jams suspiciously, taking one jar for his larder and reconsidering the idea of growing some quinces for himself.

Balloons and straws, barometric pressure. What had the fool been talking about? Lycaste cut himself a small slice of the cake to try since he'd not yet had breakfast and took the rest over to the steps leading to his underground cellar. It was possible that Jotroffe had been referring to the approaching storm, though what those random objects had to do with it, he didn't know.