The Absolute Book
Page 40
‘But without argument. There are informal agreed prices.’
‘This is so strange. Almost normal,’ Taryn said.
‘There are too many of them to think of themselves as a family, or even a kind of religious community, which is what the Island of Women is, in effect. Bartering and the division of labour works for these people. This is the Human Colony.’
‘But where are the sidhe who Took them?’ Taryn kept running her gaze over the crowd, waiting for her eyes to snag on someone poised, beautiful, momentous. But there were just humans, and all of them seemed to be speaking the language Taryn had come to recognise as sidhe, but in a hasty, choppy, expressive manner, making it their own.
‘Most of these people were born here,’ Jane said.
Taryn abruptly remembered Neve’s slighting dig at Shift about her and Jacob. ‘Are they a breeding pair?’ Neve had said.
‘But when were they born?’ Taryn asked. The people seemed all to be adults, somewhere between youth and early middle age.
‘Continually. And sometimes there will be as many as three generations, before the pregnancies end.’
Of course, it would be simpler to acquire souls for the Tithe by breeding people. Of course. Of course. Taryn was chilled with horror, then hot with rage. She stopped walking, and Jane did too, turning back with a concerned expression. But Taryn wasn’t just going to stand here and have someone equally helpless explain to her once again that things were just the way they were. Even if Jane acknowledged the criminal cruelty of it all, she’d still be used to it, and would have come to some accommodation with the situation a long time ago.
Taryn set her jaw and pushed past Jane. She pursued Shift, who was going at Jacob’s pace. Jacob had been jostled by the canoe ride, although he had spent most of it lying down with his head on Shift’s feet.
Shift was buying food. He’d acquired a basket to carry it in and was now paying for it, apparently by spitting over and over into his hands and pouring the spit into the palms of the fruit seller and the baker and the fishmonger. Taryn barely registered this. She had a spurt of disgust that felt like a slick of fuel on the fire of her fury. She reached Shift’s side and grabbed hold of him. Jacob, despite his infirmity, lunged quickly forward and caught and righted the falling basket.
‘You’re not going to tell me there’s nothing you can do!’ Taryn shouted.
Shift shook her hand off and she grabbed at him again with both hands. She tried to pull him close, but her fat sling bag got between them.
‘Let’s take this somewhere else,’ Jacob said. He was treading on the spot, lifting his knees high, trying to ease a spasm in his back.
Shift stayed quiet. This only made Taryn more furious. She shoved him, and he flung out an arm for balance and it met the hot wall of the nearest oven. His spray-dampened sleeve immediately began to steam.
Jane and the others arrived. Kernow chopped his walking pole down between Taryn and Shift. ‘Young woman,’ he chided. The tip of the stick landed in the tapioca-like clot of spittle and scattered it. It was mendings. Shift was swapping mendings for food.
Silence spread through the market. Shift edged away from the oven and the dark print of his wet sleeve vanished almost immediately.
‘I don’t know what’s thrown her into this passion,’ Jane said to Shift, apologetic.
Taryn said, ‘The sidhe breed people and barter them away for their own lives at the Tithe.’
The silence became absolute—all that could be heard was the bleating voice of a child fruitlessly demanding something, the same word over and over. And then the child stopped, and melted against its mother’s skirts.
A child, thought Taryn. There are children here.
‘Stop it,’ Shift said. ‘These are all free people, and this is their home.’
‘Shift even has a wife here,’ Kernow said.
Shift looked at him like one betrayed, then, pushing people roughly out of his way, he hurried away from all of them.
Gradually the market came back to life. The baker gave Taryn a wary look, then crouched at her feet to scoop up the mendings. He carefully poured them onto a small crack at the apex of his hive-shaped oven.
Someone said, in English, ‘Hark at the woman and her biting ways.’
Someone else said, ‘Take thyself hence, thou quarrelsome carrot top!’
‘Come on, quarrelsome carrot top,’ Jacob said. He handed the basket to Jane and took Taryn’s arm. He didn’t lean on her, but insisted on walking fast. ‘It hurts me to walk slowly,’ he said. Then, ‘Did you see which way he went?’
It was a while before the women caught up with them. Kernow was still behind, his stick thumping. ‘Take the next right,’ said Henriette, ‘and go on to the top.’
The street went straight uphill, and branched into two paths.
‘Right again,’ said Henriette.
The path they took climbed the slope in a series of switchbacks, passing through citrus groves and avocado orchards. It went all the way up the headland, a bare bluff overlooking the lagoon, the rivermouth, and the seaward spit bedecked with cooking fires. The sun had gone below the horizon, and lamplight showed in the flotilla and tents, and as a very faint glow beyond the bend in the river that hid the lagoon where the Tacit lay.
Smoke rose from two holes in the rock on top of the bluff. One plume was clean woodsmoke, the highly scented timber that had appeared in wayside camps once they left the mountains, prized for cooking since it flavoured whatever food was cooked on it. The other plume was blue-grey, and astringently chemical.
The steps down from the bluff didn’t reveal themselves until they were right upon them. A steep staircase cut into the rock. It was wide enough for a single person, and had a rope rail bolted to one side of it and, on the other side, a drop of hundreds of feet to the canopy of the riverside forest. The risers were too deep for Kernow to go down comfortably or safely, so he sat and lowered himself from step to step. Taryn was now behind him, at the back of the group. Jacob didn’t need her help, and no one else seemed to want to talk to her. She waited while Kernow plopped himself down the staircase. He let her hold his stick.
A great crowd of swallows made knots in the sky above the cliff. They sometimes plunged together, celebrating the twilight, their glassy voices deafening when they flew close, a black mass foaming up the cliff face, streaking by only a few feet from Taryn.
The women had vanished into the cliff. Taryn, at the elbow of the stairs, could see a flat platform at a cave mouth. The western light striped the platform, as if it were coming through tall narrow windows cut into the westward face of the spur. Taryn spotted windows further down the cliff. It appeared that the top third of the bluff was hollow, and inhabited.
Someone strode onto the platform, a swirl of a skirted coat, wide sleeves, unbound, curling, dark red hair, all colour and glitter. The man vaulted up the steps and gathered Kernow into his arms. For a moment, Taryn had her nose near the sidhe’s red curls. The perfume of his body broke over her, and she wilted. The gentle invisible Hands surrounding the sidhe caught her and helped her down the last flight. But once she was on the platform, they let her go and she saw the oily disturbance in the air as they rushed to their master’s feet like small, voiceless dogs.
The sidhe placed Kernow back on his feet and turned to Taryn and held out his hand.
For the stick.
Taryn gave it to him.
The sidhe folded the old man’s hand around its handle, and they went into the light-splashed interior of the bluff.
Taryn remained where she was, in the open air, until the stone she sat on was cold. She huddled with her hands in her armpits until the fires on the shore were glowing dim red. The flotilla began to disappear light by light, and the stars in the black were bigger than anything, that winking one that must be a planet, the long bright wash of the arm of whatever galaxy it was, and no bright points of busy satellites passing over. Satellites which, even in the loneliest places on Earth, were visib
le signs of crowds talking to crowds.
None of Taryn’s party came to fetch her. Not even Jacob. In the end it was the red-haired sidhe who appeared. He crouched beside her, his robes whispering, haloed in energy and the perfume of his perfection. ‘Taryn Cornick of the Northovers,’ he said. ‘Come in. There is a bed for you. And tomorrow a bath and fresh clothes.’
‘Why are you being kind when no one else is?’ she muttered, petulant.
‘It’s politeness, not kindness,’ he said, mildly amused.
She got up. She was stiff and sore all over. He led her in. The hallways were lamplit, but all the rooms they passed had windows, sheets of mendings disturbing the stars in some but not all of them.
They went by one closed room, its big oak door strapped and studded with iron. Taryn stopped and stared. The sidhe lingered, but stayed well back from the iron, while his attendant fists of force pressed to his ankles like nervous puppies.
‘It’s a laboratory,’ the sidhe said. ‘The workroom of Shift’s friend, Petrus Alamire.’
Petrus. Kernow had mentioned Petrus. Jane had almost promised him.
‘What about the wife?’ Taryn said.
‘The wife of whom?’
‘Of Shift.’ She was impatient to the point of brusqueness.
‘She lives in the colony with the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of her second marriage. She never sees Shift, and he does not remember her.’
Taryn didn’t say anything.
‘The only way he would know he was in her presence is by the behaviour of others around them. It has always pained me to see him ashamed of things he doesn’t remember.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about it too much,’ Taryn said. ‘I’m sure it’s quite convenient for him.’
‘His former wife has laid joys and pains and daily life, new love and timeworn love, over her old unhappiness. He remembers nothing but asks to be reminded of his failings every time he comes back to the world younger and almost empty. I don’t want to watch him and that woman come face to face again, him seeing that she is someone who can never forgive him. Shift tells me you can see him. That sometimes you can. So you could see that. Your friend with cold eyes tells me Shift chose you.’
Taryn was silent, remembering the times when Jacob had reminded her that Shift didn’t choose her.
‘And Kernow tells me you are going to learn Petrus’s story,’ the sidhe said.
‘And Kernow’s, and Jane’s. Shift is securing his stories against the possibility of having to hand people over. In a way, you might say he’s saving his own life.’
The sidhe said nothing, only looked at her with careful attention.
Taryn said, ‘I don’t know you from a hole in the ground. So while I’m grateful for the hospitality of your—hole in the ground, I have no reason to explain to you Shift’s and my history, or my reservations about his plans. Or anything.’
He was still watching her in that cool, alert, mannerly way they had, but Taryn sensed she had riled him a little. So she kept on jabbing. She was in pain and waiting for some retaliatory act that would hurt her enough to distract her from the confused hurt of Jacob and Jane leaving her out in the cold without comfort or any sign of softening. This person had only come to get her because he was the host and the rules of hospitality dictated he do so.
She said, ‘Shift only needs me to help him find my mother in Purgatory. She might have leads to a thing he wants. A thing,’ she repeated with contempt, and waited for the sidhe to ask her what kind of thing. A question she wouldn’t answer, because she was far too sensible to do so, no matter how angry she was at the way her place in this quest had been secured by all the things she had cared about and lost—like Princes Gate, her grandfather’s library, her grandfather, her mother, Beatrice. How horrible it was to be drawn by degrees into caring about something that wasn’t going to save her, or her world.
But all the sidhe said was, ‘Again?’
‘Again,’ Taryn echoed, in a firm way, as if she knew about a first time Shift had been to Purgatory. Fine, she thought. Purgatory—again.
‘He isn’t here for the Moot?’ The sidhe looked surprised. ‘Only for Petrus’s help?’
‘Yes.’ Taryn was lying now, because it was all she had.
‘He went to Purgatory five hundred years ago with Petrus’s help, to find the soul of his only child, who died well before her time. Petrus and he made her a new body. They helped her recovered soul shape their homunculus so it was just like the body she had lost—in appearance at least. But, of course, it was fully human since it had been made of human bodies. It couldn’t hold the magic it had held. But she was still a powerful woman, with the pride of Lucifer. Her second life was more careless and heartless than her first, and her second death sent her to Hell. There’s more, but it’s Petrus’s story. One you’ll no doubt hear in its full, gory, transgressive, devilish detail. But you must understand that the only reason Shift wants anyone to tell it to him is to be reminded never again to attempt to raise the dead. He doesn’t want sympathy or understanding, just the reminder.’
Taryn stood speechless.
‘You’re not planning to raise the dead, are you?’
She shook her head. Something far back in her heart—a hope she hadn’t known she cherished—died like an air-starved candle; turned blue and went out. Despite magic, gates and gods, she would never see her sister again.
In the morning Blanche arrived to escort Taryn to an open-air cavern on the landward side of the bluff. There, the woman handed Taryn a big crock of rose-scented aloe wash, a boar bristle hairbrush, washcloth and towel. In the middle of the cave a small waterfall spilled from a chute in the roof. A channel cut into the rock floor carried the water away down the cliff.
Taryn brushed the tangles out of her hair, stood under the cool stream, stepped out to lather up, then rinsed. She used the towel to wrap her hair and went to stand in a patch of sun at the cave mouth. The rock was already giving off heat and she was soon warm and dry.
Blanche reappeared with fresh clothes. A long white linen dress and an olive green over-dress with three-quarter sleeves, a wide collar and a row of amber buttons. These garments came with a soft wool wrap, cream with a lemon yellow stripe. With the new clothes were Taryn’s own brown walking boots, cleaned and with new laces. Everything fitted perfectly. There wasn’t a mirror but Taryn knew she looked good. She brushed out her drying hair and it didn’t behave. It formed a cloud rather than waves. Blanche returned once more with unguents—one she insisted Taryn use, because it would save her fair skin from the sun. ‘The sidhe don’t have that problem. This lotion is an invention of Petrus’s. He didn’t think to do it until he went out fishing one day, wearing a hat, but was badly burned by the sun’s reflection. The underside of his jaw came out in blisters. He’s the sort of man who can’t see a problem until he has some personal experience of it. Can’t be told. Even after all his years of life.’
Taryn was very grateful that Blanche was speaking to her. She resolved to ask only appropriate questions and accept without comment whatever answers she received. She asked for their host’s name.
‘Aeng,’ Blanche said. ‘He’s a friend of Shift’s, though it’s rather one-sided now. Shift values Aeng’s loyalty without desiring to understand their history.’
Because she wasn’t able to think of a safe question to follow that confidence, Taryn was thrown back on memories of her own one-sided relationship, and how she’d left a man who loved her because his love couldn’t fix her—as if that were its purpose. She’d thought she was letting Alan go. That he wouldn’t have to carry her around, a cloud that rained on him all the time. But really she just couldn’t bear seeing him wait—with dignity and patience—for her to love him back. Taryn wondered how Aeng felt about the one-sidedness.
Blanche conducted Taryn to another east-facing open-air chamber for breakfast. Susan was there, but not their host, or the vaunted Petrus, or Jane and Henriette. Or Shift, or Jacob.
‘It’s just spite,’ Blanche said.
Taryn asked if blocking a graveside visit was just the sidhe’s habitual cruelty to Shift, or whether there was some result they wanted.
‘We don’t know,’ Blanche said. ‘But Petrus thinks Neve bit Shift to test for any residue of iron in his blood. To see whether he’d had the shot removed, as he claimed, or had lost it all at once in the usual way.’
‘By shifting,’ Susan said. ‘But would there still be a residue in his blood if he’d had the iron removed?’
‘Petrus believes so.’
‘He’s not able to change with iron in or on his body,’ Blanche said. ‘But Petrus says that Neve thinks Shift has always lied about that.’
Taryn thought of Kernow’s story, and the witch of the marshlands experimentally stroking the iron bit in the mouth of his horse. The expression on the witch’s face when she did that. The observation was a clue for any person who heard the story and took it as gospel. Every time Shift came back to the world, he was told about his allergy to iron and also offered little pieces of evidence that the allergy was, at the very least, exaggerated.
Shift had treated his mother’s protective lies as his true inheritance. And neither his mother, nor he, had taken his aunt into their confidence.
‘Neve must be furious,’ Blanche said. ‘If we keep seeing the wrong flags at the beach of the Tacit, it’s her doing.’
Taryn finished her mango and sweet potato porridge and wiped her mouth. ‘Where has Jacob got to?’
Jacob wasn’t in pain anymore. He felt strong, mobile, energetic—although something had happened that he supposed should disturb him. Even with everything that had already happened, this was so outside what he’d anticipated or wished for that he knew—intellectually—that every alarm in his shrewd, dubious self should have been tripped. But if they had, they were silent alarms, sounding somewhere else, alerting someone else.