The Promise of the Child (42 page)

So
, he thought, diving deeper. The war for the Old World progressed. Elatine, commander of the Jalan legions, was victorious and his regime now prevailed in the west, challenging the First's unbroken rule of these lands for the last six hundred years. Those who cared—and they were few—said First Lord Protector Zigadenus's death was the most the Nostrum Melius could hope for, the greatest impetus to true change in the Provinces of the Old World. They said it wouldn't be long before Elatine took the Second and—he presumed—the massacres and segregation and all the rest of it began at last in the name of revolution. Jatropha shook his head underwater, enjoying the languid sweep of his hair across his view, enclosing him. He'd known both of them, the Asiatic warlord Elatine and his high-born Firstling nemesis Zigadenus, and they had known him, albeit in subtle shades of disguise. The correct Melius had won, of that he had no doubt, but the reality was unjust. Zigadenus, blown to ash at the summit of a hill along with sixty-three mounted aristocracy, had always been the better of them: a wiser, kinder, more innately truthful creature than the ambitious Elatine. Zigadenus had been a friend.

Whatever the characters of the Melius involved, Elatine's forces were poised to mend the Provinces. Their legions stood for the time-honoured principles of distributed wealth and social equality—everything the First's dominion had denied to all but the elite within its lands. The warlord's personality, however disagreeable Jatropha might have found it when last they met, should matter no more than the grain of bread given to a starving man. It was the will of his armies and his home Provinces that propelled his advance, as well as a mysterious source of funds. Jatropha suspected there was Amaranthine coin—Firmamental Ducats—mixed in with the heaps of silk that filled Elatine's vaults, and more than a few crates of Prism materiel, too. What was important, he had to keep reminding himself when his ancient thoughts turned sour, was that Elatine appeared to hate the decadence of the age enough to be uncorrupted by it, publicly demanding as his first law of succession an end to almost six and a half centuries of tyranny, and the osmosis of all that accumulated power back to the free Melius of the Nostrum Provinces. That was fair and right but—Jatropha knew—simplistic.

The Firmament, glorious as its ancient masters wished to portray it, was in essence an impossibly delicate, eleven-light-year-wide ecosystem; an ecosystem reliant on very exact balances of power and influence to survive. The Amaranthine (though he rarely felt any connection with them any more, having not visited the precious Satrapies for many lifetimes) held sway only through the ratio of butlers, gardeners, housekeepers and paying tenants to the riff-raff that inhabited the thin wilderness—the Prism Investiture—that surrounded their huge and desolate estate, the twenty-three Solar Satrapies. If a world within the Firmament fell into disorder—as had befallen Epsilon India before the Volirian Conflict, if he remembered correctly—someone had to make sure it wasn't swiftly colonised by undesirables like the Lacaille, the Vulgar, or any of the multitude of other savage primate races into which the fringes of humanity had twisted, some of which he'd been unfortunate enough to have had dealings with whenever they'd strayed onto the Old World. It was the Old World, this murky globe of forgotten, monstrous life, that would fall apart should any of them gain a foothold, a rotten front tooth in a ruined smile. Not many of the Immortals cared all that much any more. Most were consigned to the Utopias in a dribbling stupor or swaddled in their fortresses within the Vaulted Lands, only the sharp mountains and deep forests for company. These relatively populous, cosmopolitan centres of the Firmament were where such dangers were supposed to be considered and discussed, but by the sounds of things the Amaranthine had already slipped into a coma from which there would be no waking. There were simply too few sane Immortals now to hold their protectorates, too many slowing, uninterested minds.

He rose a little in the water, watching mercurial light sliding under the surfaces of the waves; his ears keenly open to the thick sounds all around. Did it not make sense, then, to worry about who governed so much of a vital territory? To educate them, if one could, and warn them of powers that might wish to exploit them in the future? Elatine's success in the Inner Provinces would result in the joining of two very different continents under one regime, their giant inhabitants sharing so little in common; the Jalan Melius: almost fifteen feet tall at the shoulder, enlightened but passionate, brimming with testosterone; and their European counterparts: smaller, wilier, viciously supercilious.

But that was still to come, a hypochondriac's box of night-time fears. Right now there was nothing to report at all, his sources in the First, Second and lately Third having fallen silent. The silence troubled him more than any news could.

The Melius were a perceptive species with senses more attuned to the workings of the world than any other Prism (who were of course closer cousins to them than the Amaranthine, no matter what nonsense the First liked to propagate). They had long been sensible to the obscure motions of the Firmament beyond the sky, their history and culture filled with stories of peculiar creatures and flying galleons, magic that fell from the stars. They felt things even the Amaranthine could not feel, and as such Jatropha had listened earnestly to the generations of tales of a spirit that haunted the woods of the Westerly Provinces, a ghoul that took the form of a beast, sometimes a man, plump and vague and kindly in his appearance. On his many travels he had sought it out, intrigued by the origins of the enduring myth, but in the darkness of the forests he had felt nothing. Surely some as-yet-undocumented animal lived in the depths of those woods, something eerie enough to frighten the enormous Melius that had told him the tales, but he had not been able to find it.

But now he had a particular hobby to indulge, and another animal to find.

Jatropha extended an arm and swept it through the green gloom, meaning to swim deeper and investigate the dunes. There should be more fish about; at least two thousand individuals spiralling and flashing beneath his toes, but instead he counted only a dozen. A lionfish bristling with red barbs drifted amiably past, then changed its course and flitted away. He turned his head to watch it go. Something was coming.

Jatropha cupped his ears and dropped lower into the abyss. Since sounds moved much faster in liquid, he'd often thought the world beneath the sea was a more solid, real place than the world above, where beings dwelt in almost nothing by comparison: thin clearings of gas used as spaces to call home. At first he kept losing it, but soon the whispered song grew loud enough for him to turn away and close his eyes. The thing sounded almost human, more than whales or dolphins ever could. He'd heard those mammals speaking as spring turned to summer, warning one another of a recently arrived danger. Jatropha had called out to them tentatively, remembering that dolphins tended to shyness when they learned that men could speak their words. After enough careful pleasantries had been exchanged, they'd told him more about the creature than any of the Melius knew, even that poor Drimys. Now he wanted to meet it himself.

The Amaranthine took his hand away from his ear and opened his eyes. It was close now. Despite everything Jatropha knew, he was scared. It was coming for
him
, having undoubtedly felt his heartbeat before he'd heard a thing. But he still couldn't see it.

He began to mouth his own construction of the song, keeping it low at first while he practised, feeling only the vibrations in his throat. He spoke louder into the brine, having already had a few weeks' practice. The sounds around him stopped immediately. The Immortal waited, turning like a hanging body in the breeze. A child's body. At least
that
would end, unless they'd all been very wrong.

The huge face loomed to his right, appearing in the dappled shafts of light like a full moon through clouds, the opposite direction from where the songs had been coming.
Tried to trick me.

It appeared to smile as it watched the Amaranthine, though he knew it couldn't, that it didn't know how. An accidental development producing meaning from the set of a predator's jaw. He floated, looking at it properly for the first time.

It was easy to see how some might guess the creature was related to white sharks, now reduced and rare in these waters, but this close it really didn't look much like them at all. Jatropha studied the lines of its ghostly body, the angles of its many fins—a greater number than any class of mackerel shark possessed—thinking the massive creature bore more of a resemblance to a huge, primordial sunfish than anything else. It waited, a white circle watching him in the empty green ocean.

The Immortal sang to it again, and this time the fish replied.

PART IV

Colour Blend

A bristle came loose from her brush as she ran it over the swab of blue, lodging just beneath a dry patch of white that she planned later to turn into the implication of a cloud. There weren't any clouds today, of course, but it would give the landscape some drama.

The bristle drooped in the thick blue and settled, some liquid collecting over it in a line of darker ultramarine. She looked at the hair critically, her hand poised, ready to flick it away with a nail. No, she would leave it, scrunching her eyes and twitching her head this way and that to see what others might see. The minute imperfection would give the future cloud an extra dab of accidental weight. She wouldn't tell her friends that, just to keep up the mystique. Half of each painting was finished by luck.

Pentas dipped the brush quickly in water as she glanced back at Impatiens, basking in the sun, and dropped it on the table next to Briza so that he might use it if he wanted to. She selected something small, wide and rectangular to block in his sagging, sleeping form, studying the brush for loose ends. She'd have to get some new materials from Sonerila; the birds had bought some beautiful things during their last outing to Mersin. Her watercolour set had come with her from the Seventh, containing blocks of mineral that never appeared to run low.

She wiped a line of water over the paper's crinkled surface and dabbed at it gently with a stained cloth.
Wrong colour.
Impatiens was pinker. She tickled some raw cadmium with the corner of the brush, rubbing it into the dirty mix on her palette, then adding white. Pentas knew the combination for her own skin without thinking, painting self-portraits in private that the others weren't allowed to see: sienna and rust, lots of white, finished with a touch of lemon. That extra yellow could be too much; it had to be applied very carefully. Sometimes, in a certain light, she didn't even think she could see it at all.

Pentas glanced for a little longer at the dozing man. He always sucked his tummy in. In sleep, the hidden extent of it rolled out, askew nipples and belly-button resembling a confused and idiotic face. Her hand moved about the scene, blocking and suggesting. It darted without thought to a space of blank paper just above the crown of the man's slumped head, swiftly implying a tower.

She stopped, looking again but painting nothing more. Lycaste's house was a wobbling haze in the thick heat beyond, its bougainvillea wailing across the distance. Several brightly coloured parrots hovered in the turbulence between the gardens; mating pairs, Eranthis said.

It was a lonely walk eastwards across the beach these days; she wouldn't go any more without someone to accompany her. The birds still lived there, pruning and harvesting the gardens, their haul of food too much for any of them to finish, but they found it lonely, too. It had been more than a month now since Lycaste had left, his crumpled note still making little sense. Elcholtzia wouldn't say much about the night Lycaste came to him, at first refusing to reveal anything at all. The stirrings of guilt were almost unnoticeable now as she looked at the towers, her crinkled work drying before her in the baking afternoon. Impatiens's dappled shade began to look more and more inviting.

She exhaled gently, seeing all the places where they had sat and strolled and talked. She'd fooled herself that his looks could mend what had never been there, feelings she simply didn't possess. He'd never have been satisfied. Life would have been unbearable for them both.

A shadow slipped across the painting, a cool, sharp drop of seawater on her shoulder. Callistemon bent to kiss her, ducking away when he saw he was dripping onto the paper.

“I like this one,” he whispered, studying the painting. Briza hummed on the grass beside her, engrossed in his own drawings.

“How was your swim?” She was glad of the chance to stop. The work would remain an unfinished study.

“Drimys came with me at last. We trod water out by the Point until he could relax. Didn't see a thing.”

She tilted her head to look up at him. “You look better today.”

“You always say that.”