The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers (23 page)

‘There’s nothing magic about the wishstone,’ said Odolo. ‘It’s, it’s beautiful, yes. It’s got a kind of soft music about it, and inside there’s all rainbows, never still but always moving, a brightness amazing when you get it in the dark. But no magic. Else what would it be doing in the treasury? Injiltaprajura’s rulers would be using it from dawn to dusk to wish and rule.’

‘You’ve tried it?’

‘I...’

‘You have!’

‘Yes,’ admitted Odolo, unaccountably embarrassed. ‘But the wishes never came true. I knew they wouldn’t. The thing is a - well, let’s just say it’s an old thing. Very old. The people here, they, it’s because it’s unique that they’ve got it locked up, I mean had it locked up. A toy. A bauble. That’s all it is, at least to them. A jewel among jewels.’ ‘You speak lightly of things most valued!’

‘You don’t understand,’ said Odolo. ‘What’s all that - that gold, jewellery, junk? What does it do? It sits there, that’s all. That’s all it can do. That’s why you people never get anywhere, you’re infatuated with accumulation, things, substance. What you don’t understand is that it’s process, that’s everything. Energy! The interplay of energy!’

He was staring not at Chegory but through him. Looking at something. A vision, perhaps. A vision distant in time and space.

‘I don’t know that I understand what you’re saying,’ said Chegory, ‘but I do know when I’m being insulted.’

‘Sorry,’ said Odolo. Then shuddered. As if a ghost had walked over his grave.

‘What is it?’ said Chegory. ‘Flashback?’

‘What’s that?’ said Odolo.

‘If you have taken zen,’ said Chegory, ‘then you’ll get these flashbacks, like me in the dark, you know. Sudden visions, that’s what they are.’

‘Oh,’ said Odolo, ‘I don’t think I’ve taken zen. I don’t - I don’t know what to think.’

But speculating about such unknowns took them most of the rest of the morning. Their conversation got steadily deeper and deeper as they made their way through (to give here their combined consumption rather than a breakdown by individual) seven cups of cinnamon coffee, four cups of tea, three plates of popadoms, two bowls of goat’s meat soup, a bowl of shrimps and then (it was not yet noon, but they were ready for lunch) two bowls of cassava and a couple of plates of fricasseed seagull with more coffee to go with it.

They had just finished the last of their seagull and the last of their coffee when the noon bells rang out to announce the end of istarlat and the start of salahanthara.

‘Well,’ said Odolo, pushing back his chair and rising from his table, ‘let’s be off, then.’

‘To where?’ said Chegory in surprise.

‘To the pink palace, of course. The Petitions Session starts shortly.’

‘I’m not going there!’

‘Of course you are. Where else can you go? You’ve no friends left to turn to. You could run away, flee into Zolabrik, take up with Jal Japone again. But you’ve told me already you don’t want to do that. So there’s only one thing left to do. Petition the Empress.’

‘But I’d get arrested if I—’

‘You can’t get arrested if you’re—’

‘Oh, if you’re a petitioner, fine, usually, but there’s a State of Emergency, there’s—’

‘Relax, relax,’ said Odolo. ‘I’m known to one and all at the palace as an imperial favourite. You won’t get into trouble, not when you’re with me. You’ll do good for yourself and good for me as well. You’ll get a pardon from the Empress, I swear to it. Better, when you tell of the pirates with the wishstone then the soldiers can start searching in earnest.’

‘Well,’ said Chegory, ‘maybe, maybe...’

‘Definitely!’ said Odolo.

Then the conjuror hustled young Chegory out of Gan-166

thorgruk and into the noonday heat through which they went, at a pace appropriate to the heat, up Skindik Way and then up Lak Street towards the pink palace standing in all its glory atop Pokra Ridge.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

‘If this doesn’t work,’ said Chegory, as they sweated up Lak Street, ‘then I’m finished.’

‘Relax,’ said Odolo. ‘Whatever her faults, Justina’s merciful, I’ll give her that. You’ll get your pardon.’

‘Sure. Or get my head hacked off on the spot. Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.’

‘Then do you want to start walking for Zolabrik?’ ‘That’s my other option, isn’t it?’

‘There’s a third.’

‘Oh yes?’ said Chegory. ‘Tell me about it!’

‘You work on Jod, don’t you? So you know the island’s ruler. So why not seek help from him?’

‘There’s no point going there,’ said Chegory. ‘Ivan Pokrov’s in jail, I’ve told you that.’

‘But that’s not who I was thinking of,’ said Odolo. ‘Who, then?’

‘The Hermit Crab, of course!’

Chegory shuddered.

‘You,’ he said, ‘have got to be crazy. Have you ever seen that brute?’

‘No, but—’

‘It’s, let’s see, it’s intimidating, that’s the word. When you know what it’s done it’s not just intimidating it’s bloody terrifying. I have to give the thing meat and stuff. Oh shit! And I haven’t! It’s missed lunch, that’s, that’s, gods, maybe it’s turning people inside out right now.’

Chegory wheeled. A marvellous view! But he wasted no time admiring it for his eyes were all for Jod. It still existed. That was something! The marble buildings of the Analytical Institute were still there, and so was the harbour bridge. But how much longer would it be before the Hermit Crab poured out the vials of wrath and inverted the island entire, or shattered it into just so many chips of scatter-stone?

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Odolo. ‘Someone else will feed your happy little friend. Or is it sacred? A sacred ritual, and you its priest?’

‘Priest?’ said Chegory, startled. ‘Me? No, it’s not that, it’s not sacred, but it’s a - a - it’s a trust, that’s what it is, thousands of people, all Injiltaprajura, but it’s me they trusted, so it’s, yes it is sacred, it is, a sacred trust, and I blew it, the Crab’s starving right now, it’s—’

‘But someone else will—’

‘They won’t! They’re all slaves, that’s what, no more sense than a coconut, or they’re mad algorithmists, just cogs and wheels and binary logic, that’s all they think of, not, not keeping two legs two arms stopping from getting turned inside out that kind of, of important stuff. I should—’

‘You should come inside,’ said Odolo, trying in an avuncular way to calm his intense young companion. ‘If you’re consecrated to the cause of victualling our crustacean-in-residence then you’d best look after yourself.’ By such talk the imperial favourite persuaded young Chegory to climb the steps and pass within the portals of the pink palace.

‘Business?’ said a guard, one of seven on duty within the foyer.

‘Petitions,’ said Odolo, and nodded pleasantly, and led Chegory onwards.

One of the guards had a black eye and a heavily bruised cheek, suggesting he might have been one of the unfortunates who had been overwhelmed during the rioting in the treasury in the night just gone. Chegory expected the man to leap forward and arrest him, but no such thing happened.

‘Up here,’ said Odolo. ‘Up the stairs.’

Up the stairs they went to the Grand Hall where the petitions session had already started. For a moment, the world wavered, and Chegory imagined he saw a fanged monster coming to quench its thirst upon his flesh. For that moment, reality tottered. Even as it did so, he knew what he was enduring: a flashback consequent upon his nighttime indulgence in zen.

Then the outlines of the world hardened again into the everyday, the quotidian, the expected and the expectable. The Grand Hall with unlit chandeliers hanging from its high ceiling. An unruly press of petitioners being held back by guards with scimitars naked. The Empress Justina high-seated upon a throne of ebony. Her white ape, Vazzy, even now being dragged away after perpetrating some (temporarily) unpardonable misdeed. Expressionless slaves standing to either side of the throne, their muscles working huge feathered fans to cool the ruler of Injiltaprajura.

Behold Justina! Vigorous her lips and big her nose, high her brow and plump her cheeks. Massive are her breasts, their weight threatening the carmine silk which binds them in. Stalwart are her thighs and thick her wrists. Surely she is the daughter of a mighty father!

Behind Justina’s ebony throne stood a huge cage with bars of black iron. Even Chegory Guy knew it for a starvation cage. It had long fallen out of disuse, for Justina was true to the traditions of her forebears, and the Yudonic Knights prefer disciplinary solutions which lead to sharp and bloody death rather than the exquisite forms of lingering agony brought to such perfection by the connoisseurs of the Izdimir Empire. Nevertheless, the lock on the door to the cage glistened with a sheen of oil which spoke of loving maintenance.

‘This way,’ said the conjurer Odolo.

Chegory let himself be led. His mouth was agape. He was staring at the battle-shields on the walls. The shields were objects of outright wrath adorned with the bloody coats of arms of the Yudonic Knights of Wen Endex. A riot of monstrous jaws, skulls, bones, sundry decapitations, hacked amputations, dripping blood and worse.

Odolo, by taking advantage of his status as imperial favourite, soon led young Chegory closer to the Seat of Mercy than he would otherwise have got in the course of the whole afternoon. For the petitions session had attracted an uncommon number of supplicants, since the searches, seizures, raids, captures, inquiries and interrogations of the last five quarters had flushed an extraordinary tally of criminals, sinners, law-breakers, tax avoiders, deserters, traitors, drug-dealers, miscreants, vandals, delinquents, runaways, truants, swindlers, perjurers and embezzlers from their caves, sewers, cellars, lairs, pits, attics, hideouts and houseboats.

Notable among those crowding close to the scimitars was a big man massively scarred by burns. Where skin remained one could see the remnants of once-glorious tattoos of dragons, sea serpents and such.

‘Who’s that?’ said Chegory, pointing him out. ‘Uckermark, the corpse master. A regular visitor.’ ‘Why?’

‘He’s always offending one religion or another.’

‘He’s a - a blasphemer?’

‘No, it’s just his job. It—’

Chegory never received an explanation of the theological disputes which interfere with the smooth flow of a corpse master’s work (certain treatments of the dead which are essential to one religion are anathema to another, and Injiltaprajura is rich indeed in religions) because he interrupted, saying:

‘Gods!’

‘What is it?’

‘Just someone I know.’

‘Who?’

‘Oh, nobody, nobody, don’t worry about it.’

The someone who was nobody was actually Chegory’s uncle Dunash Labrat, upright beekeeper and dutiful taxpayer, who was moving through the crowd in company with his son Ham. They had some of their apiarian gear with them, for bees were swarming in the pink palace and the two had been summoned to remove them.

Chegory did his best to make himself inconspicuous. This was just what he had dreaded! Publicity! The embarrassment of declaring himself and his circumstances to the Empress Justina in full view of his uncle. A nightmare come true! Then the Labrats were gone, ushered deeper into the palace by a guiding guard, and Chegory breathed easy once more.

’ ‘Well,’ he said, eager to get his ordeal over and done with now he was irrevocably launched upon the petitioning path, ‘what’re we going to do? Push in ahead of those people?’

‘No,’ said Odolo. ‘We wait. The Empress takes breaks at intervals. Then we’ll join her in a place more private and plead your case beyond the mob’s survey.’

Serendipity!

This was more than Chegory had dared to hope for!

A private audience with Justina, oh yes, that was the way. He could say everything, confess all, knowing it would not be near instantly the common talk of the streets. Under such circumstances he would count it both a pleasure and a privilege to bare his soul to his Empress. Justina the merciful! Justina the good! Most saintly of rulers, most blessed of lawmakers!

One need not search far to find the sources of such extravagant royalism. It was, after all, the Family Thrug which had overthrown Wazir Sin, that dedicated pogromist who had made it his business to wipe out Ebbies first then others afterwards. If it had not been for the intervention of Lonstantine Thrug and Justina’s subsequent adherence to her father’s policies then Chegory Guy would still have been living as a hunted animal in the wastelands of Zolabrik. Hence young Chegory was a patriot, a royalist, and a staunch supporter of imperial rule.

Chegory waited impatiently while the Empress dealt with one petitioner after another. Then he was astonished to see someone he recognised stepping forward to declare himself.

He was astonished?

Why, you ask, was he astonished?

After all, he was an Ebrell Islander, hence drug-dealers and law-breakers of all descriptions were his common companions. Surely he could have been expected to recognise many a petition-pleading miscreant on a day so busy. If you have prejudged young Chegory thus then your prejudices are not misplaced, for, as this chronicle has demonstrated already, he was typical of his kind. Nevertheless, his astonishment was fully justified, for the man instantly standing before the Empress Justina was no ordinary petitioner.