Her fingers touched it. Wood. A crutch. Azure had been here, while she slept.
My gift for St George there. This’ll slay him.
‘I’ve been here a long time,’ Xan told her, turning at last. He wore a crusader’s cross on his chest, like a target. The crutch in her hand was a spear, its end sharpened to a killing point. ‘That book’s interesting, Madmen are always interesting. Arkadin must have been mad to come here. We must have been mad. We brought our delusions. You look good enough to eat.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, guardedly, her hand on the end of the stake.
‘What were you thinking of? Jumping like that? What were you trying to do?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking.’
‘I thought you might be trying to kill yourself. Then I thought you might be trying to kill me. Because that’s your delusion, isn’t it, that we’re one and the same? Did you think you could kill me by killing yourself? That would be a little desperate, wouldn’t it?’
She shook her head. ‘You’re not me. I saw what you did to Azure. You’re not me.’
He gave her an expression full of patience and holy arrogance, a saint’s face. The makeshift spear was heavy in her hand. If she were Azure, she would drive the end into his body now, but that was the wrong way round. He was the saint and she was the dragon. He was the hero and she was the maiden. He was the rapist but she wasn’t his victim. She turned the crutch and pressed it to the floor, blunting it.
If he recognised that she was making a decision, he didn’t show it.
‘I’m not you,’ he agreed. ‘The funny thing is, I’ve gone a bit mad too. I’ve got my own delusion. Do you want to hear it?’
She gestured politely. He sat on her bed. She threw the crutch away and sat beside him. She didn’t turn her head and he was forced to talk into the warm, fuzzy mass of her hair round her ear, into the bandage above her eye.
‘In the streets, they’re saying that the helicopters didn’t just crash, they were brought down. They were smashed out of the air.’
She gazed down at his clothes, tatty and unkempt. He must have been sleeping in them, for days now, while he went into hiding. How on Earth had she imagined that he was wearing armour? He wasn’t a St George, riding into battle for glory, God and blood. He was a St Patrick, come humbly to hear the deathbed confession of the ancient hero returned from the lands in the west. Roman George slew dragons with a sword, Welsh Patrick cast them out with a curse. Was there a difference? That was another of Arkadin’s stories, recounted in his journal, the journal Xan now held, the journal she took from him and folded protectively in her arms, across her breasts.
‘Go on,’ she said.
‘They say, in the streets, that it wasn’t an Act of God, it was a dragon.’
‘That’s a metaphor. They like dragons round here. You might have noticed.’
‘There are people who’ll swear they saw it.’
‘People will say anything. Mass hallucination. When people are high on adrenalin, they can believe anything. It’s easier, simpler to believe that a dragon did it than that it was an accident and that we’re completely helpless against fate. You have to believe that, because I know what you’re like. Call them dragons. Dragons are better than nothing. Nothing is scary.’
‘You’ve been thinking again.’
‘I have.’
‘Is Esteban’s cock nice? Does it feel good going in?’
‘I’ve had worse. I’m not you, Xan. I don’t want to be anything like you. Not any more.’
‘They say, these people in the streets, that they saw it fly up from a window of the old free house, this great red dragon shrouded in its own smoke. They say it ate the sky and everything in it. Then, when it was full, it flew back to its perch. They say before it was a dragon, it was a woman, a woman clothed in the sun, flying up from the windows. I saw you jump; I didn’t see you fall.’
‘Your point being?’
‘That’s my delusion. I want to become a dragon.’ He smiled. He never stopped smiling. ‘A man can dream, can’t he?’
He light-touched the fine hair on the back of her neck. She felt a mild shiver, nothing to perturb her. His other hand was inside her thigh, stroking and controlling. ‘What will you do?’ she asked.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back. One way or another, I will make this city mine. I will sit on the dragon throne. There’s a vacancy, now Arkadin has gone.’
‘You should run away. Run as far as you can. Run to the ends of the earth, if you can make it. If you think I’m a dragon, you don’t want to be messing with me.’
‘I can’t do that,’ he told her, sadly. ‘I couldn’t live with myself.’
She looked down at her feet and the broken crutch. The saint, she thought, would not be speared by the dragon. The dragon would consume him, with her breath or in her belly. His fingers confidently penetrated her. She turned to him, smouldering, red, her teeth bared. From the deep of her stomach, she growled.
Later, she was alone in her room. Xan was gone, bones and all.
Doctor Arkadin’s book belonged to the library. She covered herself with her dressing gown and went out into the passages to return it. These corridors were now as familiar to her as the rooms in her grandmother’s house. Both smelled of garden-gathered spices, musty and unclean and lived-in. Both smelled of home. Even in the dark, she knew the house well enough to move freely, cutting through front- and back-stage alike, with her naked soles touching both bare floorboard and carpet. She’d have to see all this in the daylight, to see what had changed since the battle, and what hadn’t.
The lights were on in the library and Luis was waiting for her, perched insolently on the edge of Flower-of-the-Lady’s desk. His face was a rim for his grinning teeth. He seemed unsurprised when she arrived, and took the proferred journal with the proper hush of a librarian. While he went to find its place on the shelf, she made a quick inspection of the room. The War in Heaven table was set out in its usual place, with the red and black pieces gathered in untidy formations around the base. They’d been displaced by a cardboard box, which she opened and found full of junk: broken chunks of metal that might have come from a statue or a bust; fragments of clockwork; charred photographs pulled from a fire, the pictures blackened, bubbled and unidentifiable. Items damaged in the siege, she imagined; mistakes of an earlier administration. No books. They were all safe.
Luis returned wordlessly, carrying a simple, plain wooden chair, as he had done on that first morning in the library months before. He placed it in front of the desk with its seat turned towards her, but said nothing about it. Kay stood awkwardly, unclear if she was meant to sit. She folded arms and cuddled herself, waiting for the first move. He smiled back, bluffing silently. War in Heaven.
He gave in first. ‘Thanks for returning that. It was checked out years ago. We had it on record as lost, mislaid or forgotten. To tell the truth, it’s all in here.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘Never had a chance to see it, of course, but I’ve heard it read, and I’ve a great gift for recall. Luis the Memorious, they call me, when they don’t want to call me blind. One day, I thought, I’ll have to write them down. They’re Arkadin’s words; they ought to outlive me.’
‘Doctor Arkadin’s,’ she retorted, automatically.
His teeth opened and became a rim for his fat, ticking tongue. ‘We don’t need to bother about the title any more. He’s dead and gone. If your friends at the Club did one good thing for Candida, it was to wash away his memory. The dragon throne is empty.’
‘Wasn’t it always?’
‘Something sat on it, even if it wasn’t quite a living thing.’ He walked to the shuttered library windows and touched the wood thoughtfully before returning to his place at the desk. ‘Down in the city, they’re already talking about w
ho sits there now; Arkadin’s replacement, that is. They’re not sure yet if she has a name, and they wouldn’t recognise her if she walked past them in the street, but they think they know her all the same.’
‘The chatelaine?’
Luis shook his huge white mane. ‘She wouldn’t be doing with this sort of nonsense.’
Kay considered the chair with a more careful eye, but there was nothing to it that hadn’t been revealed at first glance: a plain wooden seat, the varnish faded but the grain and knots of the original wood still visible and robust. One of the legs was skewed, the crossbar popped out of its socket. It would take her weight, though it would hardly be comfortable.
‘Would you like to sit down?’ Luis asked. He’d moved again from the desk, and became a tempting serpent coiled at her shoulder. She put her hands on the ridged chair-back, finding plain wood, good wood.
Would it really be that simple? Just sit down and take control of an entire city. Just sit and become the new Doctor Arkadin, but better this time, remaking Candida to her own sensible designs without any of his gargoyles or follies or mistakes. Was this where Prospero had led her after all; through the labyrinth and the trials to the centre, to the power and the prize? Just sit and take the reins of Candida, easy as riding a bike or a dragon, easy as flying. No-one could say she hadn’t deserved it.
I’ll never be gone, Xan had said.
She prodded the chair, just hard enough to knock it out of its centre of gravity. It swayed and toppled backwards, hitting the floor with a dull, unremarkable clatter. As the sound died away, so rose Luis’ sardonic, approving laughter.
Kay turned to him. ‘Are you still looking for a permanent assistant?’ she asked.
‘An assistant and an heir,’ replied the great black Father Christmas. He stabbed a finger at the fallen remains of the dragon throne. ‘You can start by picking that up.’
Candida was solid now; it was the old world that felt like a dream. Kay shook her head to clear away candy-floss thoughts. She was on the path walking away from her grandmother’s house, and she resisted the urge to look over her shoulder or turn back.
Settling her old life’s business had meant a lot of paperwork spread out on a coffee table and some arduous phone calls to solicitors and accountants; but, by way of compensation, there had been little heavy lifting. She’d found that she hadn’t collected many things that she truly wanted to take back to Candida with her. Once she’d decided on clothes, there’d been very little to pack. Her former Better Half and his new girlfriend had brought her regular cups of tea that she had left half-drunk. They had been little votive offerings made to placate her. The new girl had accepted her presence with an almost Taoist equanimity, but Their Better Half had gradually begun to twitch impatiently.
‘So, you’re never coming back?’ he’d asked.
‘Well,’ she’d said, throwing him a cheeky smile that he’d not seen from her before, ‘never’s a long time.’
She’d showered before she’d left, taking the opportunity to change from her holiday clothes into the tabard, vest and tights that were the uniform of the house of dragons.
It was drizzling on the featureless landscape as she left the cottage, and there was no sky, just smooth, invisible white above the horizon. The road was obscured by rain, but she saw and recognised the figure waiting for her halfway down the hill. It was tiny and twisted and stood on four legs – two of them rigid and sturdy like wings, the others tapering weakly to the ground. Kay ran to her, her pack thumping hard against her back as she went.
Azure was precariously balanced on her crutches and almost fell backward as Kay slammed into her. The older woman caught her in a hug before they both toppled. Kay pressed her face into the bird-girl’s shoulder, and though her mouth moved, no sense and no sound came out of it. Azure finally freed a hand and brushed contentedly at Kay’s damp hair.
‘Luis told me where you’d gone,’ she explained. ‘I had to come after you. I’ve got a good sense of direction, and I was worried you wouldn’t find your way back without help. I thought you’d need me.’
Kay, crying dryly into her friend’s shoulder, listened and understood and couldn’t speak.
Azure’s face pushed closed to hers: ‘He couldn’t take anything away from me.’
‘Candida,’ Azure said at last, ‘I want to go home.’
Further down the road, concealed in a ditch behind a thicket, was a concrete drain outlet driven through the side of the hill. Kay had played in its mouth when she was young, once the woods became too dangerous, and there was a story among the local kids that it was a secret passage to the other side of the world, to unknown lands that had yet to appear on any map. The black tunnel was dank and stank of sewage, and even curious children didn’t care to venture too far into its promising emptiness. Whatever lay at the end was blank and unwritten.
The two women of Candida stood at its mouth, their hands twined inseparably tight. Then they went down into it together and Disappeared.
Also Available from Andrews UK and Telos Publishing
Force Majeure Page 19
