Time's Mistress

by Steven Savile

  I staggered out into the early morning rain, not knowing where I was going, only that I had to find him, find my son and beg him to be my Scheherazade, to tell me my life over a thousand and one nights, to tell me everything: who I am, who I was, who I will be.

  The cold hit me, the bone deep chill.

  It didn’t matter. I was going to find him and he was going to give me the truth no matter what the cost.

  Lovers were huddled in the doorway across the street from the apartment, one impossibly handsome Latino with the whole sky reflected in his eyes, the other an elegant mistress with raven black hair and deep-set haunting eyes. Their fingers intertwined as they watched me pass, a lost soul in a big city of equally lost souls. They smiled gently, like mother and father watching their baby take her first steps, nodding encouragingly as I looked up and down the street, trying to taste my son on the wind.

  Like they say, every journey begins with a single step. Putting one foot in front of the other I began walking.

  ***

  Time’s Mistress

  “What will the clock make of me, my sweet, sweet Suli?” Immaculada wondered on her death bed.

  He took her hand in his tenderly, tracing a finger along the ridge of fine bone standing out against the slack skin. “The clock adores you,” he assured her. “Its love is written in every crease and fold of your flesh, lady. Do not worry about your place in time, Odalisque. You should rest.”

  “Flatterer,” she scolded him gently, but her smile told him all he needed to know. Suli smoothed a matted grey curl away from her brow. It pained him to see her like this, so humbled by age. She chuckled at that old name, as though it amused her to be reminded of her innocence. “There will be time enough for that, my boy.” Immaculada lay back in the pillows. Sweat stains soaked into the fabric around her head like some dirty halo. He only had to close his eyes to remember her as she was the first time he had laid eyes upon her: the great beauty of her youth, the olive cast to her skin and the innocence of her deep brown eyes. He could see her now as though it were only a handful of revolutions of her precious ‘clock’ ago.

  The old woman never referred to it as time. For her it would only ever be the clock. The rest, she had argued so many times during her long life, was meaningless. Planets could revolve, the clouds ghost across the sky and tides roll in relentlessly and they were merely mechanisms of life but the clock was different, it was a mechanism of precision. Its ticks and tocks were relentless.

  She had been such a beautiful child. A miracle. The Sultan’s men had brought her out of the Komark after the fighting had devastated the township. A babe in swaddling clothes. She had no name so Suli had chosen to call her Immaculada, innocence. It had seemed so fitting to him then. Eight thousand people lived camped in the wretched filth and squalor of the Komark, and one by one they had died there in that filth. By dint of survival Immaculada had become the hope of the poor—an innocent soul in the Sultan’s court. No one wanted to remember but neither did they want to forget. There was something altogether more tragic in letting eight thousand souls slip away unremembered. So this little girl with the big brown eyes became so much more than a mere orphan.

  “This line,” Suli said, smiling as he traced one of the deep creases across her palm, “this was the first. Your birth line.”

  “Read it for me, my love. My eyes are not so good.”

  “Of course,” he said, ever the storyteller. “Come with me to the day it all began.” She smiled despite herself. “The darkest day in our people’s history of dark days. It began much as every day had for as long as anyone could remember—with the sounds of fighting and the screams of dying. It was worse though. The civil war had entered its end game. It was funny, no one could tell you when the sun came up. The sky was black. Amid the sounds of war and terror was one note so out of place you couldn’t help but stop and listen in wonder. It was the sound of a baby being born to the world. You, my sweet. No one understood what was happening at the time, of course. How could we? It wasn’t until Uskafel brought you up to the palace that anyone suspected anything out of the ordinary. You were six days old by then. The big man pounded on the heavy doors and, as though in answer, the Sultan’s Perpetual Motion Clock fell silent. They said it was not possible, of course. Time could not stand still, neither could the grand mechanism. The timekeeper swore and huffed and laboured, but it was useless. The clock that could never stop had stopped. The great hourly bell would never cry out again. So, of course, others took it as a sign, pointing fingers at the slaughter of the township. The gods were angry, they cried, these woeful flagellants beating themselves bloody in the main square were right, of course, the gods were angry. And why wouldn’t they be? A few bands of steel had succeeded where centuries of starvation, privation and hardship had failed, but the clock had not ceased its ticking to mark the passing of the dead, far from it, it was honouring you, sweet Odalisque.”

  “You old fool, it was nothing of the sort,” she said.

  “How would you know? You were six days old, now hush, I am telling the story, not you.”

  “Yes, Suli,” she said, smiling indulgently.

  “Now where was I? Oh yes, the clock … Even to this day the grand mechanism has never moved on so much as another second. Did you know that? In the silence of the palace no one knew what to do. They looked down at this bundle of beautiful child and listened to the absence of time, that one ever-present in their lives until that very moment, and like the clock they froze.

  “It was Iminez who suggested we take you up to the enchanter. I think perhaps even then she knew, or at least suspected. It was up in his draughty minaret that the raveller divined the truth that surrounded your life. More than a few suspected the old charlatan was spouting the usual lies—the old fool was one of the many deeply affected by the slaughter of Komark—because he didn’t want another death on his hands.”

  “You say that as though he had been asked to put me in a sack and drown me like some annoying kitten, Suli.”

  “And it was just so, believe me, Immaculada. The world you were born into was starkly different to the one you are leaving behind, my love. The clock may no longer tick but the thing it measures always moves on relentlessly, does it not? People were torn between wanting to remember and wanting to bury every reminder. More than anything you were a reminder. Especially when the raveller made his gambit. He took you in his bony old arms and cradled you close, your tiny lips inches from his ear. He nodded, kissed you once on the forehead and returned you to Iminez’s arms. The silence was almost reverent while people waited. When finally he spoke it was to say that you were our salvation. Eight thousand souls lived on through you and only through you might we, their murderers, find salvation, and eventually redemption.”

  “And when you think of it now, when you see me lying here like this at the end of my story, do you see redemption?”

  “I see the most beautiful woman who ever lived,” Suli said. “I see the one person who ever owned my heart, and of course because of that, I see my greatest regret.”

  She looked at him. He had always thought she saw him like no one else ever did. She didn’t see the old man he had become, but neither did she see the young man he had been. She saw the myriad of people he might have become had he made different choices, the better men, the worse men. She saw all of him, all the ghosts of choices made and choices avoided. He had never hidden himself from her. That, more than anything, was what convinced him it was love not infatuation.

  “Are you trying to make me cry again?”

  Now it was his turn to smile. They had been together a long time, a lifetime, and he had never seen her cry.

  She winced then, the slightest gasp escaping from her broken lips. She sank back into the bank of pillows beneath her head and seemed to die a little bit more before his eyes.

  “Is it time?” he asked, needing to find something to say simply to make her answer him. He wasn’t ready for her to go yet. He look over at the lea
ther-bound book on the nightstand. His last gift.

  “Patience, my guardian angel,” she barely managed the words which meant it was.

  It was difficult to imagine a world without her. She had always been the one. He would learn to live again, but with so few days of his own left it was hardly worth it. That was the worst part of watching her die; how it brought home his own strange mortality. Suli had lived more years than many. That was his curse, to live while those around him grew old and died. He hadn’t understood it when the woman had first offered him the cup. She had said “Drink, you will never be thirsty again,” and he had taken the simple clay cup in both hands, shaking with the effort of lifting it to his lips, and swallowed the water down gulp by gulp by desperate gulp.

  That woman had been his first great love. The first, he was ashamed to say, of many. But hand on heart he could swear he had loved them all brilliantly, with all of his soul.

  Her name, Sati, meant truth but he never heard a word of it from her lips. That was when he first learned the irony of names. Call a giant tiny, call a snake truth. Words could be taken and twisted to mean anything, be anything, and to conjure anything. They had power, there was no denying it. She taught him that. She taught him that the world was nothing more than words, God’s story being experienced by everyone all at once. Sati said it was God’s story because God’s was the only one worth telling. She spoke like that, as though she knew the Almighty. Maybe she did. He had no way of knowing. The woman called truth who lived in lies had taken Suli from his home, a simple hovel in the wilderness of the sands, and brought him to her palace where she had promised him eternity then gelded him. Suli the Eunuch, fated to live forever without the very thing that made eternity worthwhile. She said it was what would make his story unique. He would live out a life that, thanks to the water from the clay cup, would feel like eternity, surrounded by beauty he could never have.

  It was all a great joke to the woman called truth. Sati had been the old Sultan’s raveller. She claimed once to have been God’s first wife. The audacity of the claim had made the old Sultan covet her all the more. Who wouldn’t want to lay with the woman who had taken God into her flesh?

  It had been long before the clock had ticked its first tick. Long, in fact, before the wandering chronophage had stumbled into the Sultan’s palace clutching his drawings and raving in the delirium of fever that he had found God. Suli remembered the day. Some few from the thousands he had lived still stood out. That was one of them. He hadn’t really understood what the chronophage had meant by God. It wasn’t the deity who shaped the ground beneath their feet and put the dreams inside their heads while they slept. It couldn’t be. His God was one of numbers and formula, not divinity and martyrs. Still, the woman had been fascinated, and her fascination rubbed off on Suli. Even after all she had put him through he still wanted to please her. The need had weakened considerably but it wasn’t until the Great Mechanism was built he finally broke that curious need she had instilled in him. She called it love but he knew it wasn’t. How could it be? She took lovers in front of him using her voice, her moans and screams, to hurt him. Each little murmur was like a crucifixion nail being driven home into the soft parts of his flesh, each delicious moan like the meat being flayed from his bones.

  But there came a point where the pain had to stop or overwhelm him completely, a point where his mind could take no more while still clinging on to his sense of self. All things have to end, that is the way of things. One had to give. In the end it turned out he loved himself more. That was a revelation to Suli. The chronophage’s ramblings had been fundamental in him winning himself back. He had claimed to have found God and it wasn’t her God. That made it a God Suli wanted to find. At first the chronophage refused to share his formula. It was for the Sultan only, for only one so close to the divine could dare to understand it. Of course the Sultan made the right noises, pretending that the marks on the paper made perfect sense to him and that in fact the chronophage had made the smallest miscalculation in his workings. He corrected this with a slight down-stroke of black ink and handed the crumpled paper back to the grateful chronophage who bowed and scraped obsequiously.

  Suli could read, he was one of the few in the service of the Sultan who could.

  He knew that the slash of black on the parchment was meaningless.

  It was one of the first times he saw the vanity of the Sultan. The man could not admit weakness. Suli had no such problem. There was safety in weakness. They weak survived. All of the wisdom that claimed the fittest and strongest survived was a myth. The weak were ignored. They were never considered a threat. The strong were forever challenged to prove their strength, to fight and kill and die. That was the way of strength. Even the very strongest, those supposedly untouchable, spent every waking hour glancing over their shoulder for the knife they knew had to be coming. The weak were left to walk in peace. It was the first great irony Suli had learned. It had been lady liar who had taught him—though it had not been a lesson she had shared willingly. Far from it, it was the first thing he stole from her. There were others, but none so valuable. He watched the way she played different people. She had a different face for each encounter. A different way of saying yes, of demurring or deferring or denying. She was fascinating, and far, far stronger than the Sultan could ever have dreamed because of it. So while the Sultan lied and pretended to his court that he was some great God King, all seeing, all knowing, the woman took everything away from him. And how did she do that? She became his wife.

  The Sultan had six hundred women he called wives, all charged with a single duty, to give him sons.

  Such was the colossal vanity of the man, he would have a kingdom built in his own image.

  At first Suli had struggled to see how the man could hope to keep six hundred women happy, but as he got to know them he realized it wasn’t about their happiness, it was about his image. These women had secret lovers, secret because should the Sultan ever discover he had been cuckolded not only would their lives be forfeit, their lovers would die as would everyone of their blood. It was a heavy punishment, but it only served to make them all the more careful not to get caught, it didn’t stop them from spreading their legs.

  She was the only woman who refused to give him a child, and she cheated on him more than any other but somehow she did not get caught. The other wives whispered about her until she had their tongues cut out or had their eyes put out or their flesh burned until it was ugly and the Sultan couldn’t bear the sight of them never mind their touch. One by one the other wives fell away until there was only the snake. Suli had befriended many of them, his survival depended upon the kindness of others and with the Sultan being unpredictable at best, downright fickle at worst, friends in his court were a must. It was the game of politics. She was good at it. He pitied the wives because without realizing it they had become brood mares and stopped being women. They simply didn’t know how to deal with Suti the liar. He couldn’t help them though. He didn’t dare risk his own position. So he fell into the comfortable lie of weakness.

  He spent his days watching the chronophage building God. That was how he described what he was doing. He was building God. God was in the machine. At first Suli hadn’t grasped what he meant but day by day it became clearer. The Great Mechanism was a colossal construct. Its gears and levers, pendulums and cogs were all part of the guts of the world. They were the rhythm that everything in creation danced to. It was illuminating. Suli was a hungry student. He lurked at the man’s shoulder listening to every mumble and curse as something went wrong and every slight joy as something went right.

  When Suti realized she had a rival for his affections she laughed. It was that familiar derisory laugh she used to belittle him. It pleased him. It meant that he was hiding his strength from her as well. She might have taken his prick, the ‘man’ on the outside of his body, but she would never take the man inside.

  She underestimated him.

  Ultimately that was how he had bee
n able to kill her. She had never imagined him capable of such deception. But of course he had always been capable. That was why the Sultan had kept him around, not because of his wry wit or his asexual good looks. He had killed more than once for the man, and taking the drink, sacrificing old age for this prolonged youth was a deal that worked well not only for Suli but for the Sultan and his son, and his son, and his after. He was the constant in their lives: death with his charming face.

  Of course, it had been nothing more than a coincidence that his plan had come to fruition on the same day the Odalisque was brought into the palace. It was his fault that the clock had stopped. No one save for him and the Sultan himself knew the truth of what had happened. The Sultan because it was his will, Suli because it was his doing.

  When he asked Immaculada if it was time he was asking so much more than: is this when you leave me? He was asking her if it was time for his final gift. Only at the very last would he open the book and show her the truth. The chronophage might have found God but it was Suli who stole him. It was Suli who had taken God out of the machine and given it the liar instead. Soon it would be time for him to share this stolen God with the woman of his heart. He longed to see her expression, to see the wonder in her eyes as it all came to life before her. What better way to leave this earth than looking into the face of the divine? He thought, stroking her brow.

  It had been hard watching her grow old. Time was merciless. More than once he had regretted killing Suti simply because she must have known where the wellspring was. She had given him the clay goblet, she had made him drink the water and the water had kept this face of youth on his old bones. One sip could have bought him a decade with the Odalisque. One mouthful a lifetime.