Her—what was the word? her ghostliness—had some special meaning for them, something that was horrifying and revolting and compelling in equal measure. It had something to do with their flight from Mars, and with whatever horrible evil Piccadilly had feared. And apparently Martian newspapers—if they had them—were no more reliable than terrestrial ones, because the news quickly got around that all Earthpeople were ghosts. Frightened crowds demanded answers, pointed up at the sky, at the tiny blue dot that was the Earth. She tried her best to correct their misunderstanding, but without a great deal of success. She tried to describe the human body, but they appeared to think that she was making a joke.
The crowds urged her this way and that, and important-looking people came to lead her here, or there, or elsewhere, to be studied and talked to and threatened and cajoled. She demanded that Piccadilly be allowed to go with her. In part, that was because she had begun to trust him. In part it was because she pitied him, and she didn’t care for the way he’d been treated, and she felt that if there was fame and honour to be won among the Martians for subduing the Earth ghost, it properly belonged to Piccadilly. In part it was because he was the closest thing she had to a friend. He went before her into the crowded squares, shouting as if he were her prophet or holding up a red light to clear a path, like a philosopher in the marketplace. Squabbles arose around him, squalls of argument and excitement and motion. She had no clear idea what he was saying, but the role seemed to agree with him: as time went by he stood a little taller, his wings shone brighter. She felt drunk. She kept wanting to laugh.
* * *
By the time she was presented to their Parliament, the thrill of it all had worn off. She was tired of being prodded with questions, tired of being the object of fear and wonder, tired of understanding nothing, and rather afraid that she might simply disappear under the crush of attention. She wondered if that was what being famous was like back on Earth, and if so, why anyone would want it. All she could say to the Elders of Parliament was that she wanted to go home.
Parliament was her own word, of course. She didn’t know precisely what they were, this little roomful of elderly Martians. All she knew was that Piccadilly was eager to impress on her their tremendous, paramount importance and dignity. So far as she could tell, most decisions in the lunar city were made by the demos as a whole, by casting of beads after the Athenian fashion—subject, no doubt, to the influence of certain great orators or generals or philosophers. Meanwhile, decisions of great importance were reserved for a caste or class or council of leaders, consuls, dictators—who were, perhaps, chosen for excellence of birth, not by the popular vote, and who therefore resembled Lords more than Commons … She didn’t know. She suspected it was hopeless to try to understand the Martians in terms of terrestrial institutions—not least because she didn’t understand those terribly well either. She certainly hadn’t been able to explain Parliament to Piccadilly.
Regardless of what one might choose to call it, the highest authority of the city took the form of nine mostly elderly Martians. There was nothing obviously grand or powerful or dignified or important about them. They wore beads and scraps of silk, just like everyone else; in fact, it seemed to Josephine that they were, if anything, a little shabbier than the average. It seemed to her that they were mostly women. She couldn’t quite say why—something about their manner suggested that they were matrons of their kind.
This innermost sanctum, this deepest penetralia of the lunar city, was a crowded little room that Josephine had initially taken for just one more of the hundreds of the bead workshops that could be found all across the city. In fact it was a workshop: there were tools, and work-tables, and scraps, and shavings, and clutter. There was an intense red fire in one corner of the room.
Three of them came shuffling forward, staring in various directions, as if hoping to catch a glimpse of her. The rest continued bead-making, working drills and needles with their fingers and their minds. First among bead-makers, Josephine thought, or stewards of the Bead-Makers’ Union. Or perhaps the beads had some greater significance than she’d guessed—something military, something sacred.
She let them feel her desire to go home.
The matrons wanted to know all about Earth, and she told them what she could. By now, she’d conjured up the same images of Earth so many times and for so many questioners that they no longer seemed quite real, even to her. Under the endless pressure of questioning, questioning, questioning, she was starting to forget what was real and what wasn’t—if anything here were real—if indeed there even was a here. Sometimes London seemed like something she’d read about in a book, or recalled from a dream. Were there really green trees, and blue skies, and a black and sooty city of pink wingless apes?
She felt herself drifting again, into one of those states of vanishing in which hours or days or months might pass in the blink of an eye. She willed herself to remain present. This room, these ancient old dried-flower Martians, were real and solid things. She concentrated on one in particular, the foremost and perhaps the most ancient of the three, a creature whose wings were little more than withered petals, and whose face—unusually broad and round for a Martian—was etched with wrinkles like veins in quartz.
Piccadilly stood in a corner, shifting nervously from foot to foot, like a pigeon.
They bombarded her with questions that were at first confusing, but which she soon began to sense were of a military nature. They wanted to know about the military capacities of Earth. They seemed to have in mind an alliance between the forces of Earth and the forces of the white moon against a common enemy. She supposed it had something to do with the red moon of Mars, and with their exile from the face of Mars itself. She was rather terrified by this responsibility, and tried her best to explain that she had no power whatsoever to commit Earth to anything. They found that hard to believe, or perhaps to understand. Their military line of inquiry was confused by the fact that they appeared to have London mixed up with the Earth, and policemen mixed up with soldiers, and they had no concept of a rifle or a cannon or a gunboat, or even of swords or cavalry. Her thought of cavalry confused them even further, as they seized on the image of an armoured knight out of Arthurian legend; and then Josephine thought of dragons, and then of “Jabberwocky.” That caused the matrons great consternation. Suddenly, their images of London were full of dragons coiled around Big Ben, and Jabberwocks running wild in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, while horses rode gleaming knights into battle …
Jupiter, she was sure, wouldn’t be making such a terrible mess of things.
The matrons’ next question came so clearly that she almost heard it as words: Who is Jupiter?
A hard question to answer. She tried to tell them about Jupiter, and about Martin Atwood, and Sun and Sergeant Jessop and all the rest of them, and about Atwood’s house in Mayfair and the Company of the Spheres. She called up an image of Atwood’s library, the lamps on the table and the star-maps and the mad symbols painted on the floor. That excited the matrons greatly. They wanted to know all about the Company’s methods of travel. The notion of leaving the body fascinated and appalled them. For the first time, she thought they clearly understood what had happened to her.
They wanted to know if more Earth people would come, or if she was alone.
Well, would they? She didn’t know. In recent days she’d stopped hoping that Atwood and Jupiter would appear to rescue her. Perhaps they’d never intended to rescue her at all. Perhaps they’d tried but couldn’t find her. She still held out a vague hope, contrary to all reason, that Arthur might somehow find out what had happened to her and follow her; but that hope was fading. She’d begun to accept that if she was to find her way home, she’d have to do it herself. In fact, the thought of Atwood and his Company suddenly descending from the heavens was rather worrying. One ghostly Earthwoman had created a panic—what might the Martians do if nine of them appeared in their midst?
An image of the Company at war with the lunar c
ity entered her mind. The matrons tensed.
She uttered a quick silent prayer. That set off a further round of shock and alarm and questioning. They appeared to take her prayer for a sort of magic spell. They found her notion of God highly distasteful, and, once again, her attempts to explain only seemed to make things worse: the Holy Ghost alarmed them; Hell seemed to confirm some deep and awful suspicion; the incarnation of God in a mortal body was half-comic, half-fascinating.
The matrons started to argue. She left them to it, trying to think of nothing at all. The three conversed among themselves, fingers fluttering and wings flickering, for a very long time. Meanwhile, the rest continued shaping and drilling and inspecting beads, threading them or moving them from one pile to another, and only occasionally pausing to express agreement or disagreement with this or that. They weren’t a Parliament, or bishops or lords—they put Josephine more in mind of the Fates, weaving while they dispensed the destiny of kings and queens and nations. She named them accordingly: Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos; spinner, measurer, cutter.
With a sudden clatter of wings the Fates reached a decision.
Piccadilly stiffened, as if readying for a blow. Then he approached the table where the Fates worked. He had been summoned to testify. His wings were tightly furled and his back was bent. If he’d been an Englishman, he would have been on his knees.
He stood at the foot of the table, by the fire. He spoke quietly—that is, his motions were subdued, the colours of his wings faint. Josephine understood none of their questions to him, or his answers.
At last, Clotho reached out her fingers and entwined them in Piccadilly’s. A gesture of peace—a benediction. Piccadilly ceased trembling. Josephine thought he would have wept if he could; laid his head in Clotho’s lap like a child, weeping in gratitude, and love, and fear. Clotho, still and crystalline, glittering by firelight, resembled a pagan idol, carved from gemstone.
A moment ago, while they were getting confused about London, the matrons had seemed a little ridiculous. Now, in their own sphere again, among their own subjects, they moved Josephine to awe.
Clotho rose to her feet. With a thought, she indicated that Josephine should follow her. Then she went out into the street. Piccadilly, trembling, stood and went with her. The rest of the Fates turned their attention back to bead-making.
* * *
Josephine followed Clotho and Piccadilly alongside the rose-red river, through streets of white stone shadowed by towers. She was at first surprised that Clotho would venture out into the city alone, without a bodyguard or retinue, without secretaries or footmen or maids-in-waiting. Then she saw how passers-by looked at her, and understood that the whole city was Clotho’s bodyguard, and retinue, and everything else she could need.
Their route took them away from the river, and towards a part of the city where the buildings were for the most part uninhabited. Great white dusty mausoleums, in the shadow of the wall of the crater; cold, gloomy, and remote. In the sky, the face of Mars was deep indigo, almost invisible against the blackness, and the red moon was a tiny splash of blood.
Clotho gave no explanation. Piccadilly appeared lost in his own thoughts, sad and hopeful at once. Was it possible that they had some way for her to go home—that they were taking her to some sort of port or gateway? They’d fled the face of Mars for the white moon; they must have some way of travelling between the worlds. Piccadilly’s mood was odd—was he sorry to see her leave for her own world? Perhaps. On the other hand, it occurred to her that she might be bound for imprisonment, or execution. Her audience with the Fates had had something of the quality of a trial, and it was not at all clear to her that the verdict had been favourable.
She supposed she had no choice but to trust them. It was that or go back to haunting the cracks and corners of the city, perhaps for ever.
Clotho led them along a wide road—it had the air of a triumphal avenue, but it was silent and empty—and deeper into the gloomy districts at the city’s edge, until finally their road came to an end, dissolving into a wide expanse of rocks and rubble at the base of the crater’s wall. By now, they were entirely in shadow. The wall occluded Mars-light; at its foot there was near-total darkness. The rocks there were bare and lifeless, free of the red moss that throve everywhere else in the city. Only a faint light from the towers behind them lit their way as Piccadilly helped the ancient matron over the rough ground.
There was a cave—a deep crack, thin but tall, in the rough white rock of the crater’s edge. It was utterly dark inside. With a wave of her fingers, Clotho made a small flame in the palm of her hand, revealing a plain tunnel of stone, rough-hewn, low-ceilinged, leading down.
Josephine was far beyond being surprised by mere fire-starting; it seemed no odder than striking a match. The tunnel was nondescript; but Piccadilly was trembling, and even Clotho had an attitude of quiet reverence.
The tunnel led only a little way into the underground before opening out into a great hall. Rough rock underfoot gave way to smooth and glistening paving stones. Nine-pointed pillars rose up into the darkness. The ceiling and the far walls were too distant to make out without abandoning Clotho’s little circle of firelight, which Josephine had no intention of doing. She was suddenly conscious, as with a persistent itch that she’d been reminded of, that it was utterly freezing down in that subterranean darkness. No wonder Piccadilly was trembling.
For as far as she could see, the hall was full of the dead.
Piccadilly appeared frozen. Terror and uncertainty and sorrow radiated from him. Clotho stared fixedly forward, as if waiting for Josephine to do something.
With a jerk, Piccadilly started moving again, rushing forward, moving amongst the dead almost frantically. Clotho’s light followed him.
Row upon row of Martians lay on the floor of the vault; row upon row in neat parallel lines converging in the darkness. Firelight glinted off folded wings. Curled up like sleeping children, knee-to-chin, they were surprisingly small, surprisingly vulnerable. As Piccadilly led them farther and deeper into the vault—hunting left and right, tracing his steps from memory—there was more and more dust gathered on the bodies. Some of them had been there for a very long time. Like Arthur and his knights, waiting to be woken; or like butterflies in a case, row upon row upon row, pinned and dried and dead …
But not quite dead; or at least, not all of them. Sometimes, as they passed, a pair of folded wings would shift slightly, the frilled edges rippling, as if glad of the touch of firelight. Fingers twitched. Chests rose and fell, almost but not quite imperceptibly. Not dead; sleeping. Hibernating, perhaps. Dozens and dozens of them. Young and old, male and female. Some terribly scarred, some not.
Piccadilly stopped. He crouched beside the sleeping body of a young female, and gently touched her wings.
Then he and Clotho waited, as if they expected the body to wake, or Josephine to wake her. To breathe life into her.
For a moment Josephine despaired, thinking it was just more confusion, another misunderstanding; they’d taken her for a real angel, and imagined she could heal the sick, wake the dead …
Then, all at once, she understood what they were telling her.
This was Piccadilly’s—what? Child? Wife? Friend? Child, she thought. Her mind and her spirit were gone. All of the dozens or hundreds of sleepers in the great hall were the same. They were empty; their souls and their minds were gone. Casualties of war. What war? That hardly mattered now. She could make no sense of the visions Clotho and Piccadilly were sending her. The red moon, whirling around and around; the clash of armies in the sky over the white city. She didn’t understand. What mattered was that they were offering her a body to replace the one she’d left behind in London.
Piccadilly trembled.
What sort of sacrifice was this? Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter for a fair wind, didn’t he? What had Clotho promised poor Piccadilly? Or, more important, what was Piccadilly asking of her? For her to be one of them? For her to be what to him? To fill
this empty vessel with her spirit. A manifestation; a materialization; a conjuration, stranger than anything Mrs Esther Sedgley had ever imagined. A metamorphosis. Waking on another world like a Princess in a fairy tale, among elves and fairy folk, in the magic places under the hill, on the far side of the moon!
The body in question was short for a Martian, but with long and bright and very finely edged wings. It was mostly indigo, dark for a Martian—the same sort of shade as Piccadilly, in fact. It was pretty. It was monstrous. It was fascinating and revolting.
Could she enter this body? Was it possible, this unprecedented metamorphosis or resurrection or reincarnation? Did Clotho know, or was she guessing? Was this a matter of ordinary medicine on the moons of Mars, or was it a wild experiment? She’d had enough of wild experiments. Should she do it? Would she be able to leave again?
If she refused, what would become of her? Alone for ever, ghostly, drifting, dissolving into nothingness …
With a sensation of giving herself up to a dream, Josephine moved towards the body and studied the blank silver eyes. For an instant they were like a mirror, in which she saw herself seeing herself. Then the next thing she knew there was a cacophony of sounds and sensations, an incomprehensible torrent of pain and joy and terror and feelings she couldn’t name. The sensation of her wings opening! The world seen through wide silvery eyes. Colours were a hundred times brighter, as if she’d been seeing through a fog all this time. Piccadilly was bright as a parrot. The transformation of her perceptions that had been taking place slowly during her time on the moon finally rushed to completion. She saw Piccadilly for the first time without any suggestion of the creature about him, but simply as a rather dignified old man—an old soldier, something rather like a retired Major. Clotho had the plain grandeur of an abbess.
Josephine stood. It seemed to her that she was making some sort of noise. She fell over immediately, in a tangle of unfamiliar limbs, knees and elbows striking stone. Pain was a joy.
The Revolutions Page 29
