Kay had been sceptical. ‘What do I have to do?’ She had also been on the brink of a bad temper, which Azure’s bubbly good humour hadn’t registered and had done nothing to assuage.
‘Just stay with me for as long as it takes. Ah, you have to bring me a present. Nothing big or special. Seriously, I don’t want you to think I’m trying to cadge a freebie ...’ (Kay shook her head and watched the relief blossom out of her cellmate.) ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you so much. I just need a pole star, someone who’ll guide me back down to Earth.’
Kay already knew she would say yes but still – ‘I don’t understand. I’ll be there if you want, but I don’t know – what happens to you?’
The pause. And then:
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted.
Azure was becoming a bird.
Kay squinted. Everything was cast in red light, from the fire and the reflection of the flames on the hide of the tent. The fire burned in a hollow bowl at its heart, and Azure was embryo-curled on a blanket by its side. Kay assumed she was asleep, but her head twitched up and her face was a red blank.
Azure was naked and her skin was scored and ridged like a nut. She sniffed at the air suspiciously, then rolled back from the fire towards the back of the tent. Her body settled into a new and defensive poise, crouched on her haunches with her knees drawn in front of her chest and stomach. There was something new at her neck; a thick braid, dangling.
Kay drew out her dragon-stick and stepped cautiously forward. Azure hissed.
‘Who’s that?’ She was hostile. She sounded almost vicious. Her arms came forward warily, fingers formed into digging points. Her skin was mottled and discoloured. Kay’s eyes sharpened; Azure was blindfolded, but otherwise there didn’t seem to be another square inch of her body that wasn’t newly-textured, riddled with fresh lines and blotches.
‘I know you’re there,’ she insisted. ‘I can hear you breathing. I can smell you.’
Kay took another silent step.
‘If you move just an inch closer without telling me who you are, I swear I will cripple you. There’s no point in pretending. You think I don’t know the smell of a man, huh? You think I can’t reach the coals before you. I can make the both of us burn, but’ – she tapped the side of her head with a canny finger – ‘that’s what I’m here for. I’m here to be eaten. Hear that, I’m here to be eaten, so you don’t scare me.’
Kay didn’t move any further but instead squatted on the floor. This moment felt both wry and wrong. It was odd and oddly funny that Azure didn’t recognise her under the blindfold, but there was real fear and aggression in her. Kay hadn’t seen anything like this since her first day. The shapes on her skin were clear now. They were pictures, not blotches. They were designs executed in paint on her body.
The thin ridges on her arms were feathers, fine brushstrokes.
Azure didn’t relax once Kay had sat down. There was still a spring in her, a promise of violence. Kay didn’t want to speak and break the spell.
‘Now, who are you and what do you want?’
The paints flickered with life where the firelight touched them, when Azure breathed. Her shoulders were covered with flowers. Mandala lines coursed up and down her flanks, and snakes coiled round her left leg below the knee. Half her face was a bird with a single painted eye on her blindfold, its beak resting on the bridge of her nose. The bird was burning, its feathers turning to flame along the line of Azure’s cheek.
‘Who painted you?’ Kay asked. ‘Who’s going to eat you?’
At the level sound of her voice, Azure breathed heavily, out, but she stayed poised.
‘Kay,’ she said, no longer hostile, now distressed. ‘I thought that … Is there someone with you?’ Stupidly, Kay shook her head and Azure went on: ‘Is there a man with you?’
‘No,’ Kay replied. ‘I’m alone. The-Lady brought me here, but she’s outside, it’s just me.’
Azure’s nose twitched at the air, not bird-like, not insect-like, rodent-like. ‘That’s odd,’ she murmured, ‘I’d’ve sworn it.’
‘I’ve brought you a present,’ Kay said and extended her arm out, stick in hand, over the fire. The flame was dying; she didn’t feel it. Azure stretched out gingerly, stroking the air until their fingers met. There was a cathedral painted on her stomach, every stained-glass window a bead of colour; over her left nipple was a ragged-edged sun, on her right a moon, and a child’s face peered from the sag of flesh at the base of her neck. Her fingers inspected the dragon-head of the stick.
‘That’s right, that’s all just right. Thanks for coming. You were out so late last night, I got worried …’ She giggled.
‘I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to let you down.’
There was a collar round her neck, and the dangling braid Kay had noted was a chain.
‘Azure, what’s going on?’
She pushed forward and put her hands on her friend’s neck. The bone felt brittle, as if it might snap with a gentle squeeze; the skin was marshmallow-soft; the collar was cold leather with cold metal studs. ‘Shit! What have they done to you?’
Azure pushed Kay’s hands away, lightly. ‘They’ve staked me to a mountain. It’s not far off what I expected. I’m a virgin sacrifice. I’m bait. I’m going to be eaten.’
‘This is a sick thing to do. It’s sick. What am I supposed to do? I can’t … I just can’t …’
Under the fabric of her blindfold, Azure blinked, and Kay was close enough to feel that flutter of movement. ‘Don’t think about it. How long have I been here? How many days?’
‘Just the one night.’
‘One? Is that all?’ Azure yawned. No longer alert, she unfolded her limbs and stretched out on her back, with the chain swaying slack beside her. Kay scouted round for the tether, but it trailed out under the hem of the tent, and somehow the prospect of going outside was more frightening than waiting with Azure for her ordeal. The soon-to-be-eaten victim was taking it all with relaxed good grace.
Is that it then? Am I her proxy? Do I do it all for her so that she doesn’t have to think about how strange this is? Do I have to shoulder all her fears? Do I have to take them inside me?
Jesus.
‘Don’t be afraid, Kay,’ Azure said. ‘Fear eats the soul.’
That settled it. Kay took Azure’s hands in her own. ‘All right, all right, I don’t care what this bollocks means. I’m here for you. I’ll protect you.’
Azure sighed. ‘I haven’t slept since they brought me here. Did you have anything different to eat last night?’
Kay thought back. She’d grabbed something in a hurry from the kitchens in the old free house, nothing special, just sustenance and fuel. ‘There was something in a bowl, tasted pasty. I didn’t like it. It was grey. Tasted grey too.’
Azure nodded. ‘What did you think it was?’
‘More fish. I’m getting sick of bloody fish.’
‘Maybe, but I reckon there was a lot of root as well. You won’t have it again, unless you have to stand second for another voladora someday. This is initiation. We, you and I, are supposed to be outside time. Whatever it is we ate, it makes the whole event feel timeless. I’ve been dreaming too, dreaming without sleep.’
‘Drugs?’
‘No. I know drugs. Not drugs.’
‘Why timeless?’
‘Because they don’t live in time any more and this is the only way we can come face to face with them, so they can eat me and shit me out again. And I become a bird.’ She was up again, and waving the gift-stick in her face. ‘This is a dildo, isn’t it?’
‘It’s a charm.’
Azure snorted. ‘Did you go out and buy me a dildo?! We live in a brothel!’
‘It’s a dragon.’
‘No wonder I thought you were a man when you first came in!’
‘Clobber you?’ Azure suggested.
‘Yes, clobber, that’s about the right word.’
The sound of Azure’s even breaths soon lulled Kay back into a calmer state of mind.
‘You might start to hallucinate soon. Me, I don’t know if you’re real. No, I do, I do, I know you. Where do you think we are?’
‘In a tent.’
‘That’s what I thought at first. Are you on your back?’
‘That’s where I’m comfortable.’
‘I can see the stars.’
‘Even with the blindfold?’
She could fall asleep like this. Since Azure had mentioned the grey paste, that was all she could smell, on her fingers and in her mouth, where before she wouldn’t have remembered.
‘Even with. I can see lots of things. Except the pictures. You’re the only person who’ll ever see those, you and the dragons. Are they good?’
‘In what sense? I don’t know anything about art.’
‘Do they cover all of me?’
‘I think so. I haven’t seen all of you. That’s not a come-on.’
‘I know you better than that. I’ll take it on trust.’
Slippery silence washed over them. Kay lay looking up at the red ceiling and waiting for the stars to appear, while Azure’s breaths grew so shallow it would have been hard to tell if she were still alive. Except …
Except Kay gradually became convinced, as she willed the roof to unfurl and reveal the sky, that the warmth she felt wasn’t from the ebbing fire but from Azure’s skinny body. It was the kinetic heat of the blood pounding through her veins, the powerhouses of heart and lungs, the furnace of her stomach, the sweating hothouse of her womb.
Xan’s questions nagged at her, preventing her from settling.
‘Azure,’ she asked, quietly, ‘do you ever go back home? Do you ever want to?’
Azure rolled. Onto her front, Kay guessed, revealing the invisible pictures of her back. Tempted, she didn’t look. ‘My life before I Appeared, all my past,’ she replied, ‘is a blank page.’
‘And you like it that way?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘But is there anyone – I mean anyone – you miss?
She tasted grey, and almost before she’d asked the question, she lost time.
Kay was 20, still a student and full of naive wonder. She sat by the window in her grandmother’s cottage and gazed out toward the road and the hills beyond. It was late in the year and the fields were churned brown and pocked with white patches of newly-turned earth, as if the whole landscape was sickening. Overnight, the shape of the surrounding hills had changed. Kay’s forehead was pressed against the cold pane; she had a headache that felt like a fever and she was trying to squeeze it out into the glass. She had been crying and the surface of her eyes still felt raw. She was floating. Her feet didn’t touch the floor, which reassured her that this was an hallucination, just an effect of the grey paste.
She’d had a dream about a car crash during the night, but that wasn’t unusual. Anxiety, she guessed. Cars meant anxiety. She turned away from the window and went to visit every room in the house, trying to find some key or object in each that would help her focus her memory. Each room was haunted; the people who had once been here were now wiped from her mind. Thoughts were fragile, like magnetic tape. Grandmother’s house smelled of cinnamon. It was empty, its occupants long since dis-Appeared, as Xan had predicted.
You don’t destroy a thing just by forgetting it. Where do they all go, all the lost things, all the things we think we’ve banished?
It was morning, but late enough for the dew to have dried on the hedges and the lawn. Last night she’d been woken by Earth-thunder. She’d stumbled into the door jamb, convinced that the cottage would come down around her ears. It was an earthquake. No, it couldn’t be an earthquake, not in the British Isles, where the geology just isn’t that treacherous, where these random acts of nature couldn’t happen.
Kay left the cottage and strolled across the fields, her feet miraculously failing to make contact with the mud and the sheepshit and the dank water. The night had turned the world upside down, scattering detritus and treasure across the churned land. Plump, pink worms writhed helplessly on the surface where they’d been deposited by the storm. Ahead of her was the road, sprinkled with earth from the night’s mudslide but also with heavy chunks of stone where one of the old walls had collapsed. A car was stalled, its passage blocked by the largest piece – a slab too unwieldy to be moved without machinery. The three passengers, all men, gathered round the stone, as if trying to shatter it with the concentrated power of their minds.
Kay waved to them, floating down the slope to meet them. They regarded her with no-faces. Let me have a go.
They stepped aside and let her inspect the slab. She rested a palm on its coarse surface, gauging its weight and texture. This was slow work; the men shifted impatiently and she felt uncomfortable in their gaze. The air was unsettled, full of ozone and croaking birdsong. This was a test; she had to prove she was still in control. The slab revealed its secrets to her touch and she braced her hands beneath it, ready to move. She tightened her muscles and it flinched. She pushed, her forearms burned, she roared, the stone flipped over and rolled off the road into the ditch. The bland men applauded politely.
Confidently, she turned to them, but by then it was too late. She’d touched the earth and it had caught her with its gravity. Already she couldn’t move. Her limbs were turning numb, the flesh browning and wrinkling, the strength seeping out of her bones. She felt herself turning into Candida money, her hair and skin shedding in large, coarse brown flakes. She sank onto the tarmac and the air wheezed out of her lungs, but she could still smell her body ripening with time.
She spasmed back into the red womb of the tent.
‘What was that? Did you see that?’
‘This is a myth of origin,’ Azure shushed. ‘Don’t try to move, just listen.’
The sky was red. It was, she knew, the roof of the tent. It was also the sky and full of clustered stars, a tight whorl of them denser than she’d ever seen of a night. And here was the grey paste on her tongue and her teeth, and here was the bright new sun rising over the mountain, and the sky smelled of spent fireworks. She was still in the tent; she was lying on the wet grass beneath the naked sky.
She didn’t feel like Kay. Everything that was Kay was leaking from a wound in her side.
‘Candida is such an unexpected place. How do you think Doctor Arkadin felt, him and everyone before him, when he stumbled on the Mystery? It must have been like Armstrong and Aldrin finding blood-jewels on the moon, a discovery that they couldn’t put into words. How could he even imagine its builders, except in the spaces they made for themselves in his dreams, in his madness and imagination? There was a time before the mountains rose, when there was only one land and one sea, and even then there was Candida, without beginning or end, the serpent swallowing its own tail.
‘There. That’s the Mystery. It really is the Oldest Profession.’
She didn’t sound like Kay, but it was her voice, no doubt about that. She was giggling, her head and stomach made light by the paste.
Further up the mountainside were the dim figures of an expectant audience. They were still, but she could imagine them dancing, she could imagine them singing. They were Flower-of-the-Lady’s army of holy whores – or very much like them, their past or their future. Azure was sitting on the edge of the ridge beyond the tent, reaching for t
he horizon, and the chain was twined round her body, long and slack enough to go twice. Her back was visible and it held one picture and that picture was exactly the scene spread out before Kay – the dawn mountainside, the naked girl-sacrifice tied to the rock, her arms raised in supplication to the sky. In the picture, the sky was red. The sky had eyes, had teeth, had claws and wings. This sky was hungry.
The dragons filled the sky, the dragons were the sky, and the sky was unravelling, like catastrophe, towards the ground. Azure leapt from the ridge to meet it, and if she was lucky, she’d become a bird before she fell.
Chapter Five: Conduits
Xan was her secret. This was the only power she had over him, and she would keep it locked away and silent until it could be used.
Kay was later joining the Displaced Club than she had expected; later by a whole week. She’d told Xan she’d been taken sick, and he’d accepted her explanation without comment. He’d smiled uncynically; that was the power he had over her. She had been bed-ridden and feverish but not, in actual fact, ill. Luna and Quint claimed she’d spent two whole days unconscious after the morning of Azure’s initiation. They dressed as nurses and took turns ministering to her, mocking her, while she lay helpless in the old free house’s lazaret. She had already decided to move into the Club. Their antics didn’t move her one way or the other.
Though she recovered her strength after those two days, Azure’s initiation haunted her. She was afraid she might be picking pieces of grey paste fever from her thoughts for the rest of her life. Fragments of that strange morning would rise unbidden to the forefront of her mind, feeling as fresh as new-minted experiences, brief dislocations overwhelming her with flashback. The real world would wink out and leave her back on the awful mountainside. She’d had moments like that before Candida, and now it felt like they had been ripples from her future, displaced back through her life from this time, the taste lingering before the meal.
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