The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  This shook Neve, and she glanced over her shoulder, at Jacob and Aeng no doubt, though Taryn couldn’t see them from where she was. Neve registered something—disappointment, then some kind of relief. Whatever Neve felt about Aeng’s theft of Jacob, Taryn decided she wasn’t in on it. It was Aeng’s idea, or impulse—it wasn’t a conspiracy, or part of that common agreement they all seemed to have on the benefits of making Shift feel bad about himself.

  Neve turned back to her nephew and raised her voice to address him. ‘Son of my sister, last child of the Sidh, little god of the marshlands, for many centuries you have had a home and refuge here among your grandmother’s people. You have sustained yourself on the sweetness and peace of this place. You have invited people you loved or pitied into its shelter. You have acted as one of us. But you have never paid your part of the Tithe.’

  He interrupted her. ‘Is there a part of the Tithe that’s mine? My life has an end. Whatever I pay will only prolong your lives.’

  ‘Do you not want to prolong my life?’ Neve said.

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Shift, I am speaking for all my kind. You know what offer Hell has made for you. Hell’s standing offer of a thousand years in which the Sidh would not have to pay a single human soul. A thousand years in which our lives would be unthreatened and free. You have never seen your way to make that sacrifice. You love your life and cling to it, while human souls are pushed out of their bodies and through Hell’s Gate every hundred years. You preserve only your own Taken, while all this time you’ve had the power to spare millions. You never attend the Tithe itself, only sit stony-faced through each accounting, offer nothing, and then let what we must do be done. You don’t watch the slaughter, but you continue to sit at the feast.’

  ‘I hoped to live long enough to change things,’ he said.

  Neve stiffened. ‘And have you?’ she said. ‘Lived long enough? Changed things?’ Then, ‘What is there to hope for? Only that the angel of death will pass over you and your Taken once again, and none of you will be disturbed by the sight of the corpses heaped at Hell’s Gate.’

  Taryn looked at the people in the crowd she had already identified as doomed. She was astonished at their composure. Some of them were in tears, but they wept silently.

  ‘Listen,’ Neve said, and fell silent. A long moment passed in which only the waves spoke. Hush, hush. Then, ‘None of them are begging for their lives. Not one of these promised people.’

  ‘No one ever does,’ he said. ‘So deep is their habit of gratitude.’

  Neve took a long breath and let it out. ‘At the gate they beg. Until the end they can never believe we’ll be so cruel.’

  Cold shivers were crawling up and down Taryn’s torso. Jane took her hand again. Jane’s hand was icy.

  ‘It is on me to say all this,’ Neve said. ‘I am speaking for my kind.’

  ‘You will let me know when you begin to speak only for yourself?’ He was droll.

  ‘Once you have become an infant your soul will be of no great value to Hell. We believe that Hell cannot accept as true that your wisdom hasn’t accumulated, that you’re not a wise immortal with a young face and more magic than anyone ever had. But even Hell will find you worthless when once again you pass the age of ten, going in the wrong direction. If you want to save lives and do your grandmother’s people a great service, you must give yourself up at this Tithe.’

  ‘Or maybe the next,’ Shift said. ‘I calculate I have another four centuries before I pass ten. Going, as you say, in the wrong direction. Why must you all be in such a hurry?’

  ‘We mean to impress upon you that you have kept this extraordinary benefit from us. This respite. A time-limited good, which you have all but squandered. We want you to fully consider that, and that half of the humans present tonight will be gone before the next full moon.’

  ‘Yes. I understand. But the Tithe is not my arrangement. All sidhe on this beach were party to that treaty. I wasn’t born when you found yourself having to pay for your stolen land. Which, being thieves, you chose to pay for with stolen human souls.’

  A ripple of indrawn breath went through the sidhe.

  Neve said, ‘It was the sole agreed price. And may I remind you that that price was demanded by your father’s people.’ She spoke with cold finality. ‘He the chief of them.’

  Taryn had a moment when the other shoe dropped. Of course there had to be a reason Hell was able to threaten the Sidh. There must be a claim. A claim recognised by both parties. That’s how all these immortals worked. The sidhe had arrived, a very long time ago, in a place inhabited by demons. They drove the demons off, partitioned and—Taryn guessed she could say—planet-formed the territory. It’s why there was an Exiles’ Gate with nothing on the other side of it. They’d come from somewhere else, exiles who arrived as colonists. Then, in time, someone more powerful than demons enslaved the dispossessed demons, occupied their remaining territory, and approached those who’d displaced the twice-conquered people, saying something like, ‘We hear this place wasn’t always yours. Nice place. Shame if something happened to it.’ Fallen angels had run a centuries-long protection racket, having the sidhe collect the souls of humans who hadn’t actually damned themselves, like black marketers recruiting poachers to hunt in a wildlife sanctuary. Taryn suddenly understood so much more than she had only moments before. Then she thought, He the chief of them, and, Wait. What?

  ‘Nothing you can say or do will persuade me to hand myself over to Hell just because I’m rapidly losing value,’ Shift said, his voice filled with contempt.

  Neve nodded. ‘Then we must pass on to your people. You have listened to the tally. Everyone has surrendered what they must—with sorrow.’

  ‘I’m sure the pledged Taken are deeply touched by your sorrow,’ Shift said.

  Neve cut him off. ‘And still it is not enough. The way I’ve heard you tell it, we are all old and losing our virtue and no longer have enough energy to charm, glamour and push with love our way into human hearts. We’re afraid of the human world, you say. We find it too busy and loud. We flinch and act fastidious and find we’ve fallen short in our tally for the Tithe. But the fact is, we don’t have the appetite for this horrible project. This wholesale false rescue and delayed treachery. It’s poisoning us. You must know it’s poisoning us. So we fall short. Our only consolation is the small justice of our arrangements. That these people—’ she pointed at the delegation of Africans ‘—and all their friends have enjoyed two centuries of happiness and ease and leisure here in the Sidh. But, Shift, if you surrender none of your people, we will have to offer some of the French soldiers, and they’ve only been here a scant hundred years.’

  The horrible reasonableness of this argument.

  ‘If you give up half of the Women of the Island, the Tithe will be complete,’ Neve said. ‘The Women of the Island have had their two centuries.’

  Shift lowered his head and looked up at her under his brow. With that strange continuous bone structure from his forehead to his raptor’s nose he looked like an angry hawk. ‘I will not,’ he said.

  Neve sighed. ‘Then,’ she said, ‘for myself. I’ve always supported your decision to keep your retinue. Every Moot before this I’ve spoken for you. I accepted that you should be allowed to live by different rules, even if they are not the rules of the Sidh, where you live too.’ She looked down at the sand. Petrus’s chandelier slowly danced and scintillated above her graceful form and that dark smear of person that was her bespelled relative. ‘But I cannot support you anymore.’

  What was Neve going to do, Taryn thought—register a protest? Issue a stern reprimand?

  ‘I’ll give you up,’ Neve said. ‘I’ll move my household from your mountain and I’ll never speak to you again. And when in four short years you come back to us erased, I’ll not make myself known to you. And while you’re under the River Styx, I’ll take the glove and keep it from you. You won’t ever be able to feel your way back into your freedom and mast
ery. It is by my grace that you’ve lived so long, so well, so safely—and when my grace has gone your life will be stupid and constrained. And you won’t even know it. And if you hope your old friends and your new will tell you everything that happened here, mind that there will be a long period when you lose sight of them, during which they will disappear from all the worlds you can reach, because they’ll be in Hell, to which their souls are already promised. And then there will be scarcely anyone left who can tell you who you are. And the rest of us—your grandmother’s people—we will not tell you.’

  ‘Stop,’ said someone, a sidhe.

  ‘Don’t silence me,’ Neve said, her voice ringing. ‘Having appointed me to speak to him, how dare you. I’ll take his glove and throw this whole assembly five hundred miles out to sea. I am the last of the Nine Queens this side of the grave. I am the Gatemaker’s daughter. Don’t try to silence me.’

  Shift stood through all her hard threats and her ringing rage. But as soon as she stopped speaking he walked off the mound and out of the light. Taryn got up and blundered through the people in front of her to run after him.

  She didn’t catch up, only followed, keeping him in sight as they passed out of the light of the chandelier, the lamps and fires. After a time she could only make out his figure against the foam where the waves broke and rushed up the beach. Now and then she looked over her shoulder, thinking they might be followed. But the patch of light slowly shrank and no one came.

  She lost him when he cut up into the dunes. She retraced her steps, found his footprints and followed him onto the dry sand. If she kept blinking she could make out a pale narrow path that climbed and wandered from crest to crest. She had to use her hands to climb. The sand was soft and cold. The dune grass scraped her face and threatened her eyes.

  She wouldn’t have located him except he called out to her. She slid over humps of grass and into a hollow. The sound of the sea was muffled there.

  Taryn sat beside him and reclined on the slope. Cold sand trickled down her collar and into the tops of her boots. ‘No one gave me fresh socks,’ she said. ‘And I didn’t get mine back. They’d been rinsed in river water into a state of stand-up stiffness, but they were the moisture-wicking sort and good for at least another hundred miles.’

  ‘How very remiss of everyone,’ he said.

  ‘I like my dress and coat and shawl,’ she said.

  ‘It hadn’t occurred to me to procure any nice clothes for you.’

  ‘You weren’t presenting me for sale or exchange.’

  ‘No. I still might have laid my hands on something attractive and practical.’

  ‘Next time.’

  ‘Next Moot?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She lay back and looked at the stars. They were out in force, the skein of a galactic arm pouring down the sky towards the hidden horizon. She said, ‘I’ve been expecting to see my sister again. I only realised last night that that’s what I was hoping for. I used to be an atheist, so of course I believed I’d never see her again. But then Munin strutted in through Alan’s door, and I decided that a universe with gods might allow me, given enough time, to find her. But Beatrice won’t be in Purgatory or Hell, so I won’t see her again.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I should be happy for her.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She was the one person I couldn’t do without. She died, and afterwards I couldn’t find myself.’

  He didn’t respond to that, but Taryn waited a moment before asking him if Neve was the one person he couldn’t do without.

  ‘Probably. I’ve never had to think about it before.’

  ‘You’re thinking about it?’

  ‘I’m having feelings. I’m waiting to stop shaking. If I try to lead us across this headland in the dark and all atremble, one of us will probably break a bone.’

  ‘Neve just threatened all our lives.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does she mean it?’

  ‘She wouldn’t say any of that as a bluff.’

  ‘All right. But at least Jacob is safe.’

  Shift laughed, wildly.

  ‘It’s one less person to worry about,’ Taryn said. She was doing her feeble best to find a bright side to all this.

  Shift lay down too, his head next to hers. She told him not to point at anything because sand was clinging to his lumpy sleeves and the last thing they needed was sand in their eyes.

  ‘You sound like somebody’s mother,’ he said.

  Taryn was nobody’s mother, probably never would be. She hoped Alan and his second wife would have another. She hoped Carol and Ignace would, once the uncertainty of his citizenship was settled. Children were what the sidhe lacked. There were stolen ones—and so far as Taryn could tell they didn’t do as well with it as adults. And there’d been a handful of normal children in the market of the Human Colony, swinging along above a safety net of watchful smiles.

  ‘Aeng told me about your daughter.’

  ‘No, he didn’t. It’s Petrus’s story. I might have Petrus tell it while we prepare for Purgatory. If we even go to Purgatory.’

  ‘Is there some doubt about that?’

  ‘It depends.’

  ‘It’s what we have to do. You said.’

  ‘It can’t change the outcome of the Tithe.’

  ‘What about changing Neve’s mind? What can you do about that?’

  ‘Do you know what happened when I went to Hell?’

  ‘You told me. And I told Jacob. We’re holding everything in common, Jacob and me. I hope Neve doesn’t know that.’

  ‘She understands he’s so far from himself now that none of what you shared matters to him anymore.’

  Taryn just accepted this. She knew that—yes—sometimes people were just suddenly lost.

  ‘After I was dragged through the gate, why do you suppose Neve couldn’t open it?’

  ‘She was only pretending to try? Had she already made a bargain with Hell? The swap-Shift-for-a-thousand-years’-respite bargain?’

  Taryn heard his hair rasp on the sand as he shook his head. He hadn’t brushed it since she’d met him, and she knew it was full of felted knots and picked-up twigs and grasses from wherever he lay down. When he shifted, his body healed itself, but his hair was like his clothes, shabby if left uncared for.

  ‘That’s a no?’ she said. ‘I can’t see you.’

  ‘That’s a negative,’ he said, like some military character in an American movie.

  ‘I gather you’re asking me because you have an answer? I mean, what do I know about gates, so why bother asking?’

  ‘I have an idea.’

  ‘Which is what?’

  ‘Shall we go and see?’

  He got up and she quickly turned her head from the flurry of clotted sand that dropped from his hair and clothes. He helped her up. They scrambled out of the hollow. Once they were on top of the dune, Taryn saw that the east was promising a greenish dawn.

  They picked their way across the spit and came down among the scattered campfires around the lagoon. Picketed horses whickered and stamped. Shift started down the beach towards a small clinker-built boat with oars stowed inside it.

  The tent flap of the nearest pavilion was pushed aside and two men emerged, one fair, one dark; both tall, graceful, lustrous and somehow menacing, though Taryn had so far seen nothing but civility from the sidhe.

  Shift was easing the boat down the beach. Taryn joined him and tried to coordinate her heaving with his. Then the sidhe were at the back of the boat. One set his foot on the seat in its stern. He said something that Taryn guessed was forbidding them the use of the boat. Of any boat.

  Shift didn’t argue. He straightened, plunged his hand into the neck of his jersey, and pulled the thong of the glove up over his head. He didn’t put it on, only brandished it.

  The sidhe gazed at him, unimpressed.

  Taryn felt the soundless roar as a gate arrived. She had no idea which it might be, but it felt like one with a different chara
cter than the two she knew. And it was only then that she realised that those two were distinct from each other. This one was different—or perhaps it was the precipitous speed with which it arrived, and paused, somewhere behind the men.

  Their expressions changed to alarm.

  Shift stepped back into the water and made a gesture like a man tugging on a fishing line to play in his catch. The invisible somewhere-elseness of the gate bulged towards them. The men vanished, and the gate wheeled away.

  Shift tucked the glove out of sight again.

  ‘Where are they?’ Taryn said.

  ‘Three hundred miles west, without tools, and with a long walk to the nearest cultivated place.’

  Taryn hoped there wouldn’t be too many ramifications and reprisals. She wanted to know if he was angry. She wanted to protest, ‘But you’ve been so careful.’

  ‘My idea is quite tenuous,’ he said, as if he were responding to a question she’d asked, or issuing one of those apologies of his where he wouldn’t say what he was sorry for, only that he was sorry.

  He hauled the boat until the water caught its bow and lifted it. He let it slip past them, then jumped in. Taryn had to wade out and scramble on. He didn’t attach the rowlocks or use the oars until they were some distance from the beach. The water was dark and still. Stealth was easy. They rowed into the black reflection of the headland that hid the Tacit, until the boat’s dark hardwood hull would be invisible from the beach. The stars that dripped and stammered below them retreated back into the sky.

  As they crept around the headland, clear of its hanging bushes, those stars paled and a milky green grew in the east. But before the sun came up, the green light lost its colour, then its luminosity, and a coverlet of clouds slid over them, moving seaward. The air grew cold. Drizzle began to fall. The inlet was speckled from above by raindrops, and from below by fish rising to feed. So many fish that it seemed they were coming for the fresh water and were biting at raindrops. The boat rounded the headland and for a time Shift had to row against the current. Then they passed into the Tacit’s arm of the inlet, and the boat sped on where it was aimed.