King of Morning, Queen of Day

by Ian McDonald

  “Otherworld, Jessica. The Mygmus—the domain of infinite potential symbolism. My world, my domain; your heritage, Jessica.”

  The fall continued. A land of plump, contented cumulus clouds grazed by paisley-pattern living blimps, each a mile long. A two-dimensional world of cartoon creatures, a Technicolor celebration of noise, mayhem, and mindless, impotent violence.

  “Infinite worlds, Jessica. Faeryland. My faeryland was just the start, the access to all the others. See how they touch wingtip to wingtip, beak to tail? You can cross from one to another; eternity itself will not be long enough to explore all the worlds of the Mygmus. No limits here, Jessica; anything, anyone, you want, you can have.”

  A moon-blue landscape of bare, rounded hills was littered with dismembered statuary. A stone head half a mile across followed their descent with its eyes. Its lips moved, silent syllables.

  “Everything that has ever been, everything that ever will be. We are outside time, Jessica, in eternity, where everything exists forever at once. All this I promise you; all this I will share with you.”

  They fell on through the unending greyness. From the ramparts of a cloud-piercing tower, a sentry blew an alarum on a great golden horn as he spied the falling women beyond the edge of his world. Pennants emblazoned with eagles and swords snapped in the wind from beyond.

  “Mother and daughter, together forever. What could be more natural, more perfect than that?”

  But Jessica had seen the deeper darkness embedded in the grain of the Mygmus; four patches of shadow that seemed to enlarge by absorbing the bird flecks into themselves. They grew with astounding speed—black stars in the greyness; rough star shapes, like crude sketches of people.

  People.

  They were people.

  Four people.

  The infinite grey space dissolved into mist. The close-touching bird lands broke apart and fell away from each other in a storm of wings. She felt the Bridestone cold and slick against her back. Four figures approached through the mist. Without waiting for the command from his queen, the Damian phagus tore his javelins from the earth and ran to meet them. He crouched low, readied a javelin. Jessica recognised her father’s tall, vacant silhouette against the mist, and that of Dr. Hannibal Rooke. She shouted a warning but the javelin was aflight, an unseen song in the mist

  Gonzaga moved with dazzling speed. Hands swung, spear cracked against staff and went singing away, end for end, through the mist.

  The Damian thing rose from its battle stance and withdrew circumspectly. The four entered the small amphitheatre around the Bridestone. Hannibal Rooke’s expression was one of disbelief unwillingly suspended. Jessica’s father turned his head from side to side, searching, unable to find.

  “Jessica?”

  All her rage, all her betrayal, all her hurt, all her hatred: her heart tore in two.

  “Dad. Daddy.”

  The Damian thing had its sword from its scabbard and at her throat in a whisper. In the same breath the two old tramps, who seemed so uncommonly familiar to Jessica, had the long staves they carried hefted and ready. The Damian thing drew back a fraction. Was that fear Jessica saw, like a dull glitter, in the corner of his eyes? Wrapped in her cowl of light, indistinct, indefinite, caught in a state of dissolution and redefinition between old woman, goddess, and child, the Adversary was disdainful.

  “These held me in check these years? I’d expected better of a daughter of mine.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on here!” Jessica had wanted to scream to exorcise herself but the nightmare endured, frozen in tableau against a backdrop of everchanging changelessness. “What are you talking about? What’s happening to me?”

  Tiresias and Gonzaga approached. The Damian thing growled gutturals from the Indo-Aryan dawn, but stepped back with a glitter of sword and eye. The sun hung like a drop of red red blood in the mist. The two old men laid down their staffs, knelt arthritically. Tiresias’s rheumy gaze looked up to meet Jessica’s.

  “Truly, you do not recognize us.”

  Gonzaga moaned in his throat. His hands, like little creatures, busied themselves on the turf. Nothing to find. Nothing to be done.

  “But you do remember!” The voice was Hannibal Rooke’s. “You do remember. The fire, Jessica! The fire. Remember the fire.”

  “I. Remember. The … fire … I remember the fire!” She screamed at him as she had screamed at the Mother thing, as she had screamed at the flames a lifetime before. “I remember … everything!” She looked into Tiresias’s face—skin like mildewed leather, teeth stained yellow by tea, swathes of sweaty white bristles. Tears filled the old man’s eyes.

  “Madam, you called on us to protect you, and we came, and for thirteen years now we have been faithful to our calling. It was never our intent to fail you; never our desire that you should be brought to this sorry pass; forgive us the things we have left undone that we ought to have done.”

  “All they could ever hope to do was contain me for a little while,” the Mother thing said. “As her power was awakened, so theirs began to ebb because, don’t you see, all you vain and foolish creatures, when she created them, she gave all her power to them. They grow weaker and weaker, and she still does not properly understand her power. I stand with all the glory of the Mygmus behind me and who would deny me now?”

  The birds, the red drop of sun, the wind, the breath in the lungs, hung motionless, a moment frozen in time.

  And a voice spoke. An almost voice; syllables trapped in a throat. Gonzaga’s face was the concentration-contorted mask of a dumb man trying to speak.

  “I … do …”

  He rose to his feet unsteadily, took his staff in both hands, and thrust the whittled end into the turf. Thunder growled around the heights of Ben Bulben. A sudden wind whipped across the hillside, clutched at clothing, rattled the Damian thing’s brasses and bronzes, jingled bottle caps and B. B. badges, and was gone.

  The Emily thing’s scorn was devastating. Her laughter flayed like a whip.

  “You dare me, who can summon whole legions of faery warriors at a whim, more angels than there are in heaven, stars in the sky?”

  “Tiresias rose painfully. He lifted his staff, swung the tip to almost touch Gonzaga’s. A bar of solid blue arc light burned between them. Fat drops, blue as brandy on a Christmas log, fell sputtering to the turf. The lightning froze the Emily thing’s face in the mask of a petulant thirteen-year-old. Gonzaga once again wrestled with words.

  “She … can … too.”

  “Your powers are balanced.” The fusion light lent Tiresias’s face a hawkishness, a lean evangelical zeal. “She can match you, army for army, host for host, legion for legion, creation for creation, dream for dream, whim for whim.”

  The Emily thing looked about to stamp its foot. Tiresias continued, “Your powers equal each other in every way but one—they are differently distributed. Yours is contained within you except for that small part that maintains your faery lover phagus. Hers is more fully subsumed into us; as you so rightly deduced, our web of gyruses only began to unravel when the good Dr. Rooke unwittingly awakened her nascent abilities. The only thing that prevents her from assuming the full mantle of her might and majesty is us. In our absence, that power will revert to its mistress and she will be free to decide as she wills.” He swept his staff up in an arc, away from Gonzaga’s. The faery light was extinguished; eyes blinked away yellow afterimages, Tiresias plunged the sharpened tip of his staff into the soil beside his partner’s.

  “Come, brother.” He rested a hand on Gonzaga’s shoulders. The small tramp lowered his head, mumbled a few tongue-tied words, then looked with affection into his taller partner’s eyes.

  “Yes, it really is the time.”

  Gonzaga muttered again, the words incomprehensible, but the tone unmistakable: at last.

  They helped each other to undress, stripping off layers of torn tweed and holey woolens, frayed shirts and wads of newspaper. Gonzaga laid his knapsack and bandolier of t
ea caddies in a reverential heap. Tiresias placed his spectacles in their vellum pouch gently on top. The Emily thing hooted in derision; the Damian thing spat at them. In the end they were two naked old men, gooseflesh and wattles, slack breasts and translucent hair, shivering in the cold mist. They lay down side by side on the saturated turf curled into fetuses, recapitulating at the last the birth they had never known, and closed their eyes. Dew settled on their bodies, trickled down flanks cold, white, and hard as porcelain. Flesh colour ebbed into colourlessness, then into a granite grey. The turf grew up about their sides, their contours slackened and slumped, and at the end, there was no memory of Tiresias and Gonzaga, but only two more round grey boulders embedded in moss on the side of Ben Bulben that might have fallen a thousand years ago from the face of the mountain, watched over by the stark verticals of their totems.

  “No,” whispered Jessica. “You didn’t have to do that. Why did you have to do that?” It was only in their fading, their failing, that the full realisation of the years they had held watch over her life fell upon her—the greatness of their humility, the unstinting loyalty of their endless journeying through the mythlines. She saw what manner of love they had lavished upon her and was deeply unworthy. She would have paid any asking for them not to have faded, failed, ebbed, and dissolved back into the landscape from which she had created them so many years before. “No!” But then she heard a whisper, the memory of a whisper, in the greyness of the mists that enveloped her. Not gone, not gone, merely changed, transformed from one glory into another. Only for a time, and a time, and a little time. As long as you have need of us, we will never desert you. A whisper that only she could hear. A promise that only she could redeem.

  She would try to be worthy of the power they had released in her.

  A cry. The cry of a fox run down, the cry of the boar trapped in the forest thicket.

  The Damian thing held up its hands in anguish. The bronze, leaf-shaped sword fell to the ground and was turned to rust in an instant. His fingers stiffened, hardened, turned to wood. His leather and bronze sandals split open; white rootlets quested forth and buried themselves in the ground. His arms, his legs, were sheathed in bark; his outstretched fingers elongated into twigs and sprouted leaves. Within the duration of one cry, he had turned into a wind-blasted mountain ash. With the fading of the cry into the mist, a branch broke from the knothole that had been his mouth.

  Then Jessica felt the visions that had waited so long, so patiently, at the corners and junctions of her life, rise up in a flock and break free. A terrible, exultant joy burned up in her. She gathered the flocking, swarming visions in the grip of her imagination and stretched them into robes and wings of fire. Anything. Anything at all she desired, she could have. The visions came to her call and settled on her hands and arms, and she saw that they were shaped like birds, like the endless possible worlds of the Mygmus.

  She stepped away from the stone, toward the Emily thing, spread her phoenix wings wide.

  “Yes,” she said. “Oh yes, yes yes …”

  She saw her father and mother—the woman who had pretended to be her mother, the man who had pretended to be her father, the girls who had pretended to be her sisters; she saw Dr. Hannibal Rooke and Miss Fanshawe and tiny yapping Cromlyn; she saw Fat Lettie and Mr. Mangan and the Reverend Perrot and Em and Rozzie and their Colms and Patricks and all the ones who had ever betrayed her or hurt her or ignored her or disbelieved her or pretended they had liked her when all along they had despised her, had laughed at the girl who had had to make up such outrageous lies as the price of their friendship. She saw them all, and the things and places she could wish upon them if she but touched them with the tiniest edge of her desire. And she saw the Emily thing, the Mother thing, and saw in her the sister she should have had, and their faces, looking upon each other, were like an image and its mirror reflection. And she saw the hillside open behind her mother, her sister, and within, a gulf of light unending.

  “Yes,” said the Emily thing. “Yes, yes … yes.”

  The voice was that of a very small child, leading her new friend to the ferris wheels and coconut shies and dodgem cars of the fairground of the heart.

  “No,” said a voice, a voice full of amazement at its own sound, as if in possession of something it still did not fully comprehend. Hannibal Rooke’s voice. “No, Jessica. Don’t you see? She doesn’t care for you. She’s never cared for you. Never, Jessica, never.”

  Jessica turned her light full upon Hannibal Rooke, but he stood small and anonymous and shadowy and uncowed as a Covenanting preacher. Her father stared blinded and striving into the light.

  “No, she doesn’t care, she never cared.” Hannibal Rooke’s words came spilling out like water from the singing fountains of Rome, tumbling over each other in their haste to express themselves. “The only reason she wants you back is because she can no longer bear the loneliness of the Mygmus. Endless worlds, endless possibilities—oh, yes, I don’t deny it—but never to have anything, anyone, that you have not created yourself with whom to share it. She wants you because she can not bear to be totally and irrevocably alone forever. All for her, Jessica, all for her. Never a thought of you, of your life, your needs and dreams, your hopes and ambitions.”

  The Emily thing shrieked, “You’re lying, you’re lying, you’re lying. I’ve loved her, I’ve always loved her, she was my child.”

  Hannibal Rooke stabbed his finger through the veils of glory: the accusation.

  “Then why did you send her away from you? Why did you send her into a world without a mother, father, a family; alone, a child of three mothers, dear God!”

  “Because I wanted what was best for her!”

  The accusation did not waver.

  “That is a lie, I submit. You did not want to share what you had found with another, even with your own daughter. No, it was your own world, the private world you had always dreamed of where you could escape from all responsibilities, and you could not tolerate the responsibility of a child in your own personal wonderland, could you? You could not bear the thought that something might spoil your enjoyment of the paradise you had created for yourself, I would submit.” The Emily thing raged, and her rage shook the very hills.

  “You’re a horrid, horrid man, Hannibal Rooke, horrid.”

  “And I would further submit that your so-called love for your daughter only began when you realised that what you had thought of as eternal heaven showed itself to be a very subtle kind of hell. Yes, Miss Desmond, hell. Hell is not other people. Heaven is other people. Hell is oneself. Forever and always, oneself. Self. Self. That has been the entire motive of your … I hesitate to call it life. Existence, since you gained the ability to be and do exactly what you liked.”

  “I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you,” the Emily thing screamed over and over and over and over, and her voice was the voice of a five-year-old’s tantrum.

  “Is it true? Mother, is it true?” The birds that had swirled and swooped within the mist now felt to Jessica to be beating and flailing inside her stomach. “Is this true?”

  “Lies. Lies, all lies, every word of it, lies!” the Emily thing shrieked.

  “It is the truth,” said Hannibal Rooke, and it was he who had grown to the dimensions of a god—a stern, Bible-black Calvinist patriarch—and the Emily thing reduced to a spanked four-year-old sent to snivel in the corner.

  Then the one voice that had yet gone unheard on the hillside spoke.

  “Jessica, only you can decide that,” Charlie Caldwell said. “No constraints, no obligations; this time the choices are all yours.”

  “I’m going to turn you all into something so horrible you won’t even dare to look at yourselves,” shouted the Emily thing. “I’m going to send you all to hell forever and ever and ever and ever. Amen.” “No,” Jessica said, “I’m not going to let you do that.” The light intensified to a point where it became more than light—a sound, a dull roar, a hot, flaying wind. Hannibal Rooke clapped h
and over eyes.

  “For God’s sake, close your eyes, man!”

  “I can’t, don’t you see. The light is always there!”

  The rocks beneath their feet groaned and stirred. The air hissed and seethed. The two men felt the skin on their faces, their hands, scorch and blister. They braced themselves against the burning wind. In their mutual blindness they felt unclean winged things brush past them, snatches of goblin laughter whisper in their ears. The earth heaved and moaned; the sky tore itself apart in lightning and thunder. Caldwell’s ecstatic cry was barely audible over the battle song of Otherworlds grinding past each other: “I can’t see! No light, nothing, I can’t see!”

  And it ended.

  The two men uncovered their eyes. The backs of their hands were seared raw red. Their faces itched; there was a smell of singed cloth and hair.

  “What do you see?” Hannibal Rooke asked, carefully.

  “Mist,” Caldwell replied. “And birds.”

  The turf was littered with the bodies of dead birds. Hannibal Rooke knelt to inspect one. It was frozen solid, a tight, glazed bullet of flesh and feather.

  “Jessica,” Caldwell asked. “Emily?”

  Rooke shook his head. The solitary mountain ash close by the foot of the Bridestone was dead also, shivered to the pith by fire. Its blackened trunk smoked; red lozenges of ember glowed and flaked away. Fire had passed over the two totem staffs. Hannibal Rooke picked up a metal tea canister lying on the turf, dropped it with a start. It was colder than ice. But the rocks remained—the Bridestone; the two low, glacier-worn granite boulders, were unchanged.