The Promise of the Child (8 page)

He studied the orchard and wondered if this was the very place his stalker came to watch. It couldn't be—the far side of the garden beyond the house wasn't visible from here. He let his gaze run along the hills until it swept the sea near where he thought the caves must be.

A huge shadow was moving ponderously beneath the jade surface down there. He tapped Impatiens lightly on the arm, but the other man was too busy rummaging in his satchel and didn't look up. Lycaste punched his shoulder lightly.

“Ow! What?”

“Look!”

Impatiens followed his pointing finger, his eyes widening. The shadow turned, sickle-shaped in the waves, moving towards the edge of the outcrop.

“It's heading out of the bay,” Impatiens whispered. He suddenly stood, as if somehow it would give him a better view, and picked up his bag.

Lycaste didn't like the look of this. “What are you doing?”

Impatiens ignored him, staring. “It's big, it's a big one. Look, when it stretches out …” He waved his finger at the cliff. “He's half as long as the rock!”

“It's not a shoal of fish, is it?” Now Lycaste was standing, nervously clasping his elbows in each hand.

“No, that's definitely … there's the fin.” They saw a slip of white puncture the green. The shadow disappeared under a rocky arch and they both walked forwards into the sunlight, shading their eyes to see. It reappeared and followed the curve of the outcrop. Unless it changed course it was going to disappear from view soon. Impatiens began to run along the hill.

“I think it's only a lot of fish, Impatiens,” Lycaste called out. “Let's just stay here.”

They hadn't made any weapons yet. He watched Impatiens, suddenly afraid that the man would go rushing off to get the boat anyway.

But Impatiens was already walking slowly back to the ridge. “Gone,” he said, sitting down again.

Lycaste sat down, too. “I thought you were about to run down there and jump in the water.”

His companion said nothing at first, settling his eyes blankly on Lycaste. “It's all right if you don't want to be part of this. I'm sorry if it felt like I was forcing you last night. Drimys and I can manage just as well without you, I expect.”

Lycaste didn't know what to say. “I don't think we're ready yet, is all.”

Impatiens sighed. “And you never will, Lycaste. I'll find someone else. Don't worry yourself.”

He fell silent a moment, considering this. “You think I'm a coward.”

“It's not that. You're … sensitive.”

Lycaste flushed. “I'm not afraid.”

His friend took a long look at him. “If you can do this, you know, you can do anything.”

“You think so?”

“When we catch that shark—and we
will
catch it—love and all its mysteries will appear easy to you, nothing in comparison to the ordeal we'll have been through.” He spread his hands, one tufted, unruly eyebrow raised wickedly. “You never know, Pentas might even change her mind after seeing the great hunter with his prize.”

Lycaste exhaled long and hard, unable to avoid picturing the scene. He knew he was playing into Impatiens's hands, as he always did. “Well, if you put it that way,” he slipped a fingernail into his mouth, chewing at its ragged edge. “Perhaps we could try tomorrow.”

“Someone,” Impatiens said, beaming, “just became a man.”

Lycaste smiled dutifully. The two looked at each other and back out to sea, Impatiens grinning, his mind already visibly leaping ahead to the possibilities.

“And lots of people will want to come and see it?” asked Lycaste finally.

“Hundreds!”

“Where will they stay? Mersin?”

“Who knows? Who cares? We'll be famous!”

It was true that the last thing Lycaste wanted was fame, for he had more than enough of that already. As far away as the Fifth Province, Lycaste was known as
the Great Beauty of the Tenth
, someone so uncommonly handsome and angelic in features and form that he received callers to his house on the cove at least once a year, come to see if his face was as perfect as the rumours insisted. He had received more offers of marriage in his fifty-one years than everyone he knew combined, rejecting as a matter of course every single one of them. He had always seen his coveted reflection as a curse, not a gift, and hardly any use now that he'd managed to drive away the only girl he'd ever loved.

They set off again slowly, Lycaste following dejectedly behind as his mood darkened once more, and descended into a shaded valley. Abruptly stopping in a clearing of wild flowers, he realised he'd lost his friend altogether. It was those long legs of his; at very nearly ten feet tall, Impatiens was larger than any other Melius man Lycaste knew. He wasn't worried; the path had diverged but he knew to follow the slope of the ground upwards to Elcholtzia's house, high on the next hill.

The sighting of the shark had got him thinking. He received more suitors at his door than passing sharks, and yet here was one, the very day after he had been told of the plan. He began to wonder whether Impatiens knew more about the creatures' movements than he let on.

Lycaste continued on up the hill, clinging at rough branches as the ground steepened, but could see nobody ahead in the shadows. He brushed the dirt from his hands and listened, quite used to being forgotten by now. It happened so often that he barely registered it, sinking into his own thoughts as his friends ran ahead or debated some abstract notion that he hadn't a hope of understanding.

As his breathing subsided he began to hear it: soft murmuring, like a secret conversation in some dark corner. Lycaste crouched in the undergrowth, smelling sweet sap and soil. The light was blocked by more than just tree branches at the edges of his vision. Gesturing, clothed forms whispered to one another.

He'd been spotted. The creatures of the woods were discussing him now. Branches cracked and snapped as they moved, perhaps trying to see him better. Lycaste kept his gaze on the slope; he didn't want to appear nervous. They'd seen him often, and he was fairly sure they knew who he was by now. A friendly wave was often the best way to acknowledge their presence, for they never approached. Of course it had occurred to him that they could be the ones watching him in his orchard, but there was no evidence that they were at all bothered about the lives of the people sharing their land. Still, he hardly enjoyed their company; it was like peering from the window of a brightly lit room into the darkness of night, unknown things looking back at you.

Sounds to his left, on the slope not far away. He slowly resumed his scramble up towards the rise, lifting his arm and waving once as he climbed. The voices stopped briefly at the tiny gesture, then continued. Listening hard, Lycaste fancied he could, as usual, hear pieces of recognisable words in among the whispers. The rhythms were all wrong, though; he couldn't separate individual sentences from the mutterings around him. One of the words sounded all too familiar, though no doubt reconstructed wrongly by his racing imagination.
Pentas.

As he reached for another dry branch, a thin red arm grabbed his wrist, startling him. Impatiens grinned, hoisting Lycaste up as the ground turned to loose soil.

“You took the difficult route,” he said softly, glancing over Lycaste's shoulder.

“Are they following?”

“No.”

The ground levelled as the trees thinned, bathing them in the afternoon sun. The two men staggered out under the livid blue sky and saw that the flowers here were ordered and arranged. The mumbling from the jungle was replaced by the grumble of bees clambering heavily in and out of gaudy flowers. They had reached the edge of Elcholtzia's garden, in the clearing atop the highest hill.

A sandstone path led them through the rows of colour to a gate set in a low white wall. Just ahead was the observatory, curling southwards like a wind-bent palm. Rugs, tapestries and linens hung from the crenellated balconies of the top floor, fluttering and drying in the sun, draping down over the rear garden where the building bent back on itself. It was not, as far as either of them could discern, actually an observatory for it observed nothing, but that was how Elcholtzia grandly referred to his house on the hill. The white structure in which he lived had been almost entirely sculpted by the wind, with a sparing hand guiding it only as it deformed in the Mediterranean breeze. As with all buildings, it had been grown; implanted in the ground where its stone-like material had replicated faster than a living thing, sinking hollow capillary roots into the rock for water pipes and pouring with a whisper in every direction. It required only a firm grip or scaffolding to mould the stone as it knitted together, and within a few days you had a fine translucent shell in which to live, the sun glowing through it like the delicate skin of an ear. Extensions were added by notching the material, injuring its surface so that the thin bone of the structure reacted, growing soft and pliable again as it spread to fill the wound. Elcholtzia had grown the observatory himself years before the others arrived, when their Province was so lonely that you wouldn't see another person all month, and its S-shaped form was quite unique on the rugged slope.

With one last peek at the shadows behind, Lycaste made his way up the path, ducking occasionally as fat, downy bees droned past. Elcholtzia appeared at the doorway beyond the gate, a streak of deep orange aglow against the dazzling white walls of the misshapen building. He appeared like that with every visit, as if warned of their approach. Each time the old man stood unsmiling, waiting for them to pass through the gate, watching that they closed it properly.

“Gate?” he asked them as they approached.

“Shut,” muttered Impatiens for what could well have been the thousandth time. Watching them while they embraced, Lycaste took in how the old man had changed. His gristly frame now looked even more delicate, skin stretched over bone. Elcholtzia moved to Lycaste and patted him with a scrawny hand, thanking him for coming in his dry, uninterested voice.

Inside the antechamber it was very cool, the chill air suffused with a faintly unpleasant smell both sweet and sour. Lycaste tried to think what it reminded him of, but Impatiens got there first.

“You must try to air this place. It smells like death.”

The old man took them across the sunken cylindrical main chamber of the place to the steps, passing through long shafts of sunlight churning with golden motes. He stepped around a pool of greasy residue in the middle of the floor and pointed to the warped, painted ceiling high above. It was swarming with black flies. Just below them dangled a haunch of scarlet meat, half-illuminated in the glow of one window.

“Lamb. For my visitors.”

Lycaste glanced at Impatiens, who was looking at the residue on the floor. It was smeared in oily sweeps, as if something had slipped in it. Diminishing marks paced around the tiles and faded back to the front door. The whisperers in the jungle sometimes ventured to the edges of the cove to forage, but he had never heard of them coming into anyone's house before.

Impatiens stared the longest, perhaps wondering at the profitability of importing real flesh. “Where did that come from?”

Elcholtzia swung open a pair of tall wooden doors that led to the stairway and the angled upper floor. “I have it delivered. They won't eat my grown stuffs, for some reason.” He regarded Lycaste solemnly. “How are you enjoying the telescope, Lycaste?”

He'd forgotten all about it, there had been so much on his mind. The thing Elcholtzia had given him lay unused in the third tower, a slender tube like a rolled-up piece of paper. Elcholtzia had demonstrated its use to him as if instructing a stupid child.

“It's wonderful, Elcholtzia, thank you. I haven't had much time to use it properly, though.”

“You've been too busy?” He smiled thinly at Impatiens. “Have you looked at anything in detail yet?”

“The Greenmoon,” Lycaste lied.

“Ah, and what did you see?”

Lycaste cursed the man, always trying to teach him things as if he were not yet grown-up, catching him out when he'd not learned his lessons. He thought of what he knew about the moon. “I saw lots of trees.”

“Extraordinary—so you found a patch of clement weather?”

“I'm sorry?”

“Nothing but pea soup every time I've looked, not a break in the clouds for the last four months or so.”

Lycaste feigned poor memory. “Maybe it was just clouds, not trees.”

Elcholtzia nodded. “You should use it, Lycaste,” he said. “It broadens the mind.”

Lycaste felt his face grow hot. “I will, I promise. When I have the time.”

“When you have the time,” Elcholtzia repeated emptily, and led them into the first-floor chambers. They had to stoop to avoid hitting the wooden beams. Lycaste wondered why the man had sculpted his home so badly; everyone thought Lycaste so unintelligent, yet he would never have built his own house like this.

It smelled altogether cleaner up here, locked away from the death below. The air was spiced and smoky, the floors warm and boarded with smooth white wooden planks. There was no sound save for a muffled clicking that came from another room.

“Is the fire lit, Ez?” Impatiens asked, wandering to the next room to make tea. Lycaste watched his friend leave, afraid to be left alone with the old man. Impatiens almost never called Elcholtzia by his full name, an honour Lycaste himself had not yet earned. He thought it a strange name, suspiciously foreign-sounding. It had a bulkiness to it, an ugly, inelegant rhythm better suited to the villain in a stage play.

“Yes, I like the fragrance,” Elcholtzia replied, tilting his narrow head so that his voice would carry to the kitchen. “My mother used to claim inhaling smoke was bad for the liver—what nonsense.”

Lycaste sat on some stained and ancient-looking cushions in a bright circle of sunlight that fell across the floor, shifting further back as the old man looked at him.