Prospero's Children

by Jan Siegel

  “Where are you from, Fernani? And what are you doing here?”

  “I come from a village partway up Mount Vèz in the Viroc. North of Géna—”

  “I know where the Viroc is: I’ve seen maps. You’re a long way from home.”

  “I wanted to see the world,” she said, avoiding any hint of defiance.

  “You won’t see much of it in here.”

  “You’re good at stating the obvious, aren’t you?” She thought it was time to fight back. “It’s your turn now. Who are you?”

  “Rafarl Dev. Some people call me Raf. I’m a different kind of stranger.” She could hear the mockery turned inward, on himself.

  “What kind?”

  “A half-breed. A bastard. A traitor by blood, a freak by inclination. An inborn outcast. Don’t you know the law here?”

  “Of course not.” The landlady at the inn had talked about it, she remembered.

  “I thought everyone in the empire must be interested in the city which rules them?”

  “The Viroc is a long way away, as you said. I’m just an ignorant provincial.”

  She heard the ghost of a laugh in the darkness, a ghost as warm as friendliness. “Obviously. You’re an ignorant provincial, I’m an arrogant urbanite. I apologize. For all my doubtful status, I still think like an Atlantean. We believe our city is at the center of all worlds. I suppose that’s why the twelve families were so upset when they found the Gift cropping up among those from less select regions. It dawned on them that they were spreading their talents with their seed, so about four hundred years ago marriage with foreigners was made illegal. It didn’t do much good, of course. The bad habits of the ruling classes are well-known. But when Zohrâne took power she started ordering cross-bred infants to be butchered at birth, often with their errant mothers. A few slipped through the net. My mother is of the House of Dévornine: her kin would not let her be so casually slaughtered, though my father was hunted down like a dog. They married her to a dullard of pure Atlantean stock and my mother forced him to accept me: it was her condition for agreeing to the arrangement. She told me the truth when I was old enough to understand. A few years later I ran away and since then I’ve lived rough. I go home once in a while for a fancy meal and a soft bed. And her. She gives me money which I ought to refuse, but I don’t. The scapegrace son—only they would be unlikely to let me reform, even if I wished it.”

  “Are you really a beggar?” she asked.

  “So you noticed me.”

  “You made yourself noticeable.”

  The ghost laughed again, something between a gasp and a sigh. “Necessity. I had to get in here. I’m a beggar when it suits me. A beggar for a whim, a thief at need, a pirate whenever I can steal a boat. A parasite battening on a city of parasites, which has half the earth as its host.”

  “It’s a beautiful city,” she said.

  “Ara-yé. It’s beautiful and corrupt. I love it and hate it. That is the double curse of my heredity.”

  “Why did you want to get into the temple? It doesn’t seem to have done you much good.”

  “I can leave when I want to.” He sounded dangerously unworried. “If I’m gone too long, a contact outside will send a message to my mother. The Dévornines rank third of the ruling families, and my illegitimacy is still unofficial, no matter how badly I choose to behave. The priests would not dare offend her. But I shouldn’t need her assistance. When the ceremony is over, I’ll find a way to make the guard unbolt the door.”

  “How?”

  “Call him. Tell him there’s a hole in the wall, or the previous occupant left a handful of coins on the floor, or whatever. Pique his curiosity. Arouse his greed. The average intelligence of the temple guard is not high. When he’s distracted, I’ll try to knock him out. You can probably help with the distraction.”

  “Thanks,” she murmured. If help is required, had said the Hermit, it will be found. This is my help, she thought, suddenly sure. That’s why I’m here.

  There was a silence, already vaguely companionable. The temple drum had stopped long since and no sound came from above. “How will you know when the ceremony’s finished?” she inquired.

  “Guesswork. They don’t usually go on much more than an hour.”

  “You still haven’t told me why you’re here.”

  “Three days ago, the street patrol picked up a friend of mine on some minor charge. Probably false. Uuinoor’s honest: he doesn’t have any versatility. I learned last night they brought him here. He’ll be in another cell somewhere around.” She heard him shifting his position, restless with waiting. “If I don’t get him out, he’ll join the queue for sacrifice.”

  “So might you.”

  “No risk of that. I told you, I’m a Dévornine.”

  “Before they caught me,” Fern said, “I overheard a conversation between Zohrâne and a priest. She called him the Guardian.”

  “Ixavo. How did you manage that? You must have crept in quietly after me . . .”

  “I’m naturally unobtrusive.”

  “What are you doing—an ignorant provincial—sneaking into the temple to eavesdrop on the queen of the civilized world? It savors of spying, but you don’t look like a spy. In any case, Zohrâne’s few remaining enemies are all Atlantean.”

  “I’m not a spy. I wanted to see the temple, that’s all. The rest was chance.” She took a deep breath to steady herself. “You’re in danger. More than you know. Zohrâne told the Guardian specifically to target the twelve families. Apparently she wants the calibre of sacrifice improved. She said the last one was a nymphelin who limped. She thinks the Gate of Death will open wider for the healthy and highborn.”

  The ensuing pause felt wrong, as if the very darkness tightened. “Limped?” said her cellmate. His voice had gone suddenly cold.

  The pause stretched out for several heartbeats.

  “I’m sorry,” Fern whispered.

  Since her arrival in Atlantis she appeared to have acquired a new level of insight into the emotions of others, almost as if the barriers that isolate the individual mind were breaking down, and she was receiving messages from the naked dimension of the spirit. It had happened with Zohrâne when, for a few seconds, she had peered into the starving void of her soul—a void that reminded her of someone else, though she could not quite recall whom. And now it was happening to her in the dark, with a man she could not see. She sensed the abrupt pang of grief taking him off guard, the clenching of a complex inner pain. There was a remote quality to his grief, and the pain seemed to be associated more than anything with failure, one of many failures, as if he saw his life unfolding in an endless pattern of deeds unachieved, friends let down, enemies he could not or would not defy. Under the veneer of light-hearted fecklessness, mockery, and self-mockery, she seemed to see him examining himself through a distorting lens that made his very soul ugly. She became so involved in his pain she felt her own heart stabbed in sympathy.

  “It must have been this morning,” he said eventually. “They’re not usually so hasty. I was finished before I started.” Pause. “Not much of a hero, am I? Turning up too late to rescue someone who’s already dead.”

  Another pause. This one threatened to extend itself indefinitely. Fern rushed into speech, groping for the right words with which to string her ideas together, only half certain of what she wanted to say and too impetuous to be afraid of saying it wrong. “Nobody’s a hero all the time. A hero is just an ordinary person who does something exceptional, not a rare breed, whatever the law of Atlantis may claim. We’re all ordinary: you and me and Zohrâne and . . . and the priests and the guards and the slaves. And if we try, and fail, and still try, and go on trying—if we’re lucky and hopeful and occasionally brave—we sometimes manage to pull it off. Heroes aren’t born or made, they make themselves. There are probably lots of heroes who never do anything heroic. It doesn’t matter. Failing doesn’t matter. What matters is trying again.” The words ran out and she found herself panting from the tor
rent of them, slightly stunned at an outpouring which seemed to have come from nowhere in her mind.

  There was a silence through which she could not see.

  Then: “I thought you were a child,” he said. “A runaway waif come to seek your fortune. But you talk . . . as if you were a thousand years old.”

  I am unborn, said her thought. Many ages unborn. She flinched away from the nightmare in her head, clinging to memories that seemed to shrink in the darkness while the horror grew and reached out toward her . . .

  “Fernani?”

  “Just Fern,” she mumbled.

  “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.” That was something she was sure of, a solid fact to hold on to in a maelstrom of doubt. Sixteen.

  “Uuinoor was nineteen,” Rafarl said after a while. “He always seemed much less.”

  “Did you know him well?”

  “Not really. His sister is a close friend of mine—his twin-sister. At least, she was. She was the one who asked me to help him. You can save my brother, she said. Only you. You’re a Dévornine.”

  Fern said nothing for a few moments. She was conscious of a feeling she had rarely experienced before, a feeling sharp as a needle, bitter as bile. It fermented inside her like a kind of emotional contamination, discoloring the whole spectrum of her spirit. His sister is a close friend of mine . . . She was afraid to speak in case her voice betrayed her. Stupid, she admonished herself furiously. Stupid. You barely know him . . .

  She tried to picture how he had looked, the beggar under the arch, but her blurred recollection seemed to have little to do with the man in the dark.

  “Uuinarde thought I could persuade my mother to use her influence,” Rafarl was saying, “but she refused. She said it wouldn’t do any good. I was angry, so . . . I tried this. An idiotic impulse, no time for proper planning. I knew she’d never fail me, however she felt about my friend.” Fern felt rather than heard the sigh that followed, brushing her cheek like a zephyr. “I wasn’t really being heroic, or even brave. Mostly, I was just enraged.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to be heroic now,” Fern said, recovering herself. “I told you, Zohrâne ordered the Guardian to take the children of the twelve families. He didn’t like it—I should imagine he’s prudent rather than compassionate—but he’ll obey. You’d be ideal. A half-breed means a half measure. Half obedience, half defiance, depending on whose side you’re on. We need a stratagem to get out of here. And it had better be more effective than your last one.”

  “We?” The ghost-laugh returned, shaking his tone.

  She thought: Danger excites him. Whatever he says.

  “You may as well rescue somebody,” she said.

  They sat for a while unspeaking; she could sense his concentration, possibilities weaving, knotting, unravelling in his mind. The dark thickened around them, as though drawn and focused by his thoughts. She felt a growing pressure weighing down on her. “The ceremony should be over soon,” Rafarl said eventually. He sounded curiously breathless.

  And then: “What’s happening? I feel as if . . .”

  “. . . as if we’re suffocating,” said Fern, her voice constricted to a whisper.

  It had been cooler underground, away from the sun, but the temperature must have crept up without their noticing and now the heat was becoming oppressive. Fern could feel the sweat gathering under her short hair and trickling over her temples and down her neck. When she touched her face it was wet.

  “There’s something . . . going on up there,” said Rafarl. “Maybe . . . a fire.” She heard him rise and move to the door, thumping on it with his fist. “Guard! Guard!” No response. “Tarq-morrh . . . gniarré!” Both words were outside Fern’s vocabulary but she thought she could hazard a guess at their meaning. “Either he’s not answering . . . or . . . he’s gone . . .”

  “It’s not a fire,” Fern said as realization dawned. “It’s Zohrâne. She’s trying to—” She broke off, making a conscious effort to inhale. Breathing was no longer something her body could take care of by itself. The air pulsed in her ears like blood. She was vaguely aware that Rafarl had slid to the ground beside her: his leg touched hers at the thigh, his shoulder nudged her shoulder.

  “Trying to what?” he asked.

  “To break . . . the Lodestone.”

  “What?”

  “She’s using the twelve families . . . concentrating their power . . . turning it back on its source . . .” Haltingly, Fern tried to explain something she did not fully comprehend herself. Even as she spoke she registered a new sound carried from above, a sort of thrumming boom, like the distant hum of a swarm of bees in an echoing cave. She realized after a minute or two that it must be the drumskin in the temple, vibrating in the buildup of power. Its shivering note seemed to swell as a bizarre accompaniment to whatever was transpiring above them. The sound was not so much loud as pervasive: it resonated from floor and ceiling and walls, and the air trembled with it. Covering her ears did no good: it was already inside her. She had given up trying to talk and Rafarl’s protest was swallowed up, compressed into a fading gasp. The heat closed around them like a fist, squeezing the last droplet of perspiration from their bodies. She felt his arms move to encircle her and she clung to him in response, locking her hands across his back, seeking not shelter but mutual protection, as though their combined strength might somehow shield them from the relentless escalation of the spell. Her sweat-soaked breasts were clamped against his unfamiliar torso; she sensed his strained breathing as his rib cage heaved in her embrace. You have the Gift. Was it the Hermit who had said that? Use it. And instead of resisting the power she reached into it, toward the Stone, her untried ability waxing as it renewed contact with its matrix. She stretched out with her mind, laboring to enclose them in a cocoon spun from the very force that bore down on them. Her breathing seemed to ease, but she wasn’t sure. The clasp of her arms grew stronger than a band of steel.

  And then it snapped. There was a crack that split the air and stabbed like lightning deep into the ground. Her skull rang with something that might have been sound or light or both; for a hideous second her brain appeared to be flying apart, fragments of memory, thought, self spewing in all directions. What happened to her body she did not know. There was an instant of struggle, then blackness swallowed her. When she recovered consciousness she was doubled over and her mouth tasted of vomit. “You were sick,” said Rafarl. “On me.”

  “Sorry.”

  He was still gripping her shoulder, pulling her into a sitting position. She put her hand in the wetness on the ground and swore in a language she could not remember.

  Close by, a crevasse had opened up in the darkness, a right-angled shaft of reddish pallor. The light-source was weak, but after so long in the gloom of the dungeon it seemed dazzlingly bright. “It’s the door,” Rafarl supplied. “That . . . earth-tremor—whatever it was—must have jolted it loose. I think the bolts have ruptured.” He stood up, dragging her with him. “Come on. On your feet. This is our chance to get out.”

  The door was heavy, the hinges damaged. They both had to shove before twisted metal finally succumbed and the whole stone slab keeled outward and thudded into the passageway. “That’ll bring the guards,” Rafarl muttered; but no one came. A torch was guttering in a wall-bracket; another had shrunken to a red smolder. Fern tried to recall from which direction she had come but could not.

  “This way,” said Rafarl.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” she inquired after a couple of minutes.

  “No. And if you want to come with me, you won’t ask.”

  Around a corner they found the jailer and one of the guards. There was blood and froth on their lips and dark patches under their skin as if from bruising or internal hemorrhage. Fern was glad of the poor light so she could not see them clearly. “Whatever happened here,” Rafarl asserted, “it killed them.” He took the key-ring from the jailer’s belt and at every cell door they came to he knocked and shouted,
but there was never any answer. The note in his voice grew slightly more desperate with every hopeless call. At the last he unlocked it anyway, fumbling with several keys until he found the right one, thrusting the door open only a foot or so before he drew back. Fern saw a shadow crossing the light, shaped like an arm. “They’re dead,” he said. “They’re all dead.” Briefly, she shared his nightmare of returning above ground to find Atlantis itself a city of corpses through which they would wander aimlessly, uncertain what to do with their leftover lives. “I wonder how we survived,” he speculated. “Maybe our dungeon-walls were just a little more solid than these. Strange. I never thought I’d be grateful for the security of the prison-cell which held me.” The ghost-laugh, real enough in the dark, failed here, but not because of the torchlight.

  It wasn’t the walls, thought Fern. It was me.

  But she said nothing.

  The next door they came to was different. Not a cell door this time: taller, broader, metal-plated, inlaid with the Atlantean sun-star in some sort of copper alloy that looked bloodred in the torchlight. There were bolts at top and base: it unlocked to the largest key. The chamber beyond was invisible in the darkness, but Fern sensed height, depth, space. A smell reached her that she knew she had never smelled before, yet somewhere in her genes, in the ancient, unforgotten places of her race-memory, it was familiar. Her skin crawled. Rafarl took a torch from the wall-bracket in the corridor and stepped across the threshold. She followed him.

  The room was vaulted: shadows fled from arch to arch and skulked behind the pillars. Round the walls there were things she had seen once before, things with spikes and bars and chains, in an antique castle—she could not remember where— long ago and far away, but those had been age-blackened, rusted with disuse; these were sharpened, scoured, polished. Used. There was a brazier on one side but it had been overturned, perhaps in the aftershock of the spell. Ash sifted across the floor. To her left, the torch-glow glinted back from many edges of light: an array of knives laid along a bench, knives of every shape and size, straight and curved, broad and slender, hooked, corkscrewed, double- and triple-bladed. All scrupulously cleaned, shining in the dark. Loved. In the center of the room was a table of stone, a rectangular slab approximately the length of a man. Straps were positioned at judicious intervals; lamps stood at each corner, so angled that, when lit, their overlapping beams would cast a shadowless glare across its surface. Its very emptiness drew her, filling her eyes, filling her mind. She thought: It’s all so clean. And: Where does the smell come from, if it’s clean? But she knew the answer to that. The cleanliness was only superficial, a purification that could never penetrate beneath the skin. But the smell, the smell was old and strong. It had sunk deep, deep into the stone, into the roots of the shadows, into the sinews of the walls, permeating to the very core of the room. There were other things there too, sounds, sights, waiting under the silence and behind the torchlight. Cries and whispers, the memory of blood. She stood and listened, afraid of echoes she could not hear. When she glanced down, she saw her hand locked in Rafarl’s. He too did not speak, only moving the torch so the shadows swiveled, leaping from nook to nook. She thought of the gilded sanctum above, the germ of power at its heart, now shattered by Zohrâne in her lust and envy. This is Atlantis too, she told herself. This is the underbelly of the city. The flipside of the coin. Without it, the temple, the palaces—the whole metropolis—would not exist.