Stamping Butterflies

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Tso Chi?

  Li Han?

  He could ask the Library, only then Zaq would have to talk to the Librarian about the other thing and that was exactly what he was trying to avoid.

  “General Ch’ao Kai,” said Chuang Tzu, and saw surprise turn to pleasure as the bannerman understood he’d been recognized. “This must be important.” They both understood the hidden rebuke. All were forbidden to acknowledge the Chuang Tzu’s existence and there were no exceptions.

  The old soldier nodded. “I beg Your Excellency’s permission to deploy troops outside the city wall.”

  “And why would you want to do that?” Zaq asked without thinking. He should have said something like Deploy troops, for what reason? But more and more these days he forgot to keep his thoughts formal, his face measured.

  “Just manoeuvres, Excellency. The troops need exercise. I thought you might approve of the idea.”

  The man lied badly.

  Zaq smiled. It was a gentle smile, the kind one might expect from either a poet faced with a particularly beautiful waterfall or a scholar presented with a scroll no other scholar had seen for a thousand years. The kind an emperor might give in the face of death.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

  Real anguish crossed the old General’s face. So convincing in fact that Zaq was impressed yet again with the sheer inventiveness of the Library.

  “They can exercise in front of the Taihe Dien,” Zaq said, the nearest he was prepared to get to a compromise.

  “And in the outer city, Excellency?”

  “The square,” Zaq said firmly. “Then I can watch them from the Supreme Harmony Gate.” He wouldn’t, of course. In all his years as Chuang Tzu he’d only ever watched the troops on one occasion. He understood the levels of skill required, but had little personal interest in the use of weapons.

  Smiling at the old man, Chuang Tzu touched him lightly on his shoulder and turned to go, leaving General Ch’ao Kai looking after him. Somehow his generals were always old, always bearded and dressed in elaborate armour that seemed to consist mostly of polished tortoiseshell and red ribbon. Red was the colour of luck and given the amount used in the Forbidden City, Zaq should have been very lucky indeed.

  “Majesty…” The voice came down the corridor behind him and the fact it was aimed at his back was such a breach of court etiquette that Ch’ao Kai had to be truly desperate. Zaq could stop or he could keep walking and send a clear sign that he did not choose to hear what the General was so desperate to say.

  He stopped, that was all, stopped and stood in silence, dressed in a ceremonial chao pao as if conducting negotiations or taking a wife. And all those not watching Tris struggle her way across the bridge listened to a grey-haired, sad-eyed man tell his Emperor that the Librarian urgently requested a word.

  And those fifteen billion watched Chuang Tzu shake his head, surprisingly regretfully, and then keep walking.

  Many of them were still watching when Zaq skirted the Western Palaces and the Thousand Autumns Pavilion on his way to the rockeries and walkways of the Yuhua Yuan, the Butterfly Garden.

  They didn’t realize it yet but the Emperor had made a decision. Here was where he intended to stay. Not just for the morning or the rest of that day. Zaq would stay for however many nights and days it took for the Library to bring him the assassin.

  And when this happened and the stranger had made it across the bridge and into the Forbidden City, Zaq would stare the young assassin in the eyes and ask the question 148 billion people wanted answered.

  Why?

  And then, if he was lucky, Zaq might finally be allowed to sleep.

  “Shit,” Luca said, then apologized.

  Tris smiled. She could have told him words far worse. Some so vile he’d probably need coaching in their meaning. This thought kept her amused until he swore again, which was soon.

  “What?” she said, stepping from one plank to another.

  “Just this,” said Luca. So thick was the falling snow that there were whole hours, sometimes longer, in which Luca drifted from sight behind her and Tris was anchored to his absence through a haze of floating white that stung like memory as it turned to tears on her face.

  She had frostbite, her lips were frozen into a rictus grin and her ears felt missing, along with most of her fingers and both her feet from the ankles down. Only the wind was in their favour, having switched direction and turned to a light breeze that no longer threw snow directly into their faces.

  “Keep going,” Luca said.

  Tris’s world was reduced to narrow and uncertain strips of ice which glazed the ancient wooden planks over which she stepped. Luca’s blade was stuck through her belt and she knew this was a stupid way to carry a naked weapon, but having the blade visible reminded her why she put one step after another instead of just doing what she wanted to do, which was curl up into a ball and give herself back to sleep. Instead she put one foot in front of the other and kept walking…

  “Why have you stopped?”

  Tris turned to find Luca at her side and realized she’d been staring over the edge of the bridge without even realizing it, both hands gripping one of the main cables. And she’d been standing there for so long that snow had made gloves of the backs of her fingers.

  “I can’t remember,” Tris said.

  “You okay?”

  “Sure,” said Tris, then thought about it. “I don’t even know where I am,” she said, gesturing wearily at the way ahead and then turning to include what little could be seen of the bridge behind, which was a half-dozen frosted planks that did scant justice to the hours they’d been walking. “Of course I’m not okay,” she said. “How could I be?”

  “We’re almost there.” Luca put one hand lightly on her shoulder and appeared not to notice when Tris shook it off.

  “Two days at the most,” she said. “Wasn’t that what you told me?” They both knew it was and yet Luca seemed unfazed by the endlessness of the planks and almost happy that the ice glazing each one was becoming thinner by the hour. “So what changed?”

  “I think,” said Luca, “it’s more a case of what’s changing.” He glanced at the cloud and then at the snowflakes which continued to fall long after they passed where Luca stood on the bridge beside Tris, both of them gripping a fat cable and staring into the abyss.

  “‘What’s changing’?”

  “Well,” Luca said, “there aren’t that many alternatives. And since I doubt that time is expanding it must be the bridge.”

  “How can a bridge expand?”

  “How can it not?” Luca slipped off his cloak and did something with his hands that unravelled whole layers of material not visible a moment earlier. “You sleep now,” he said. “I’ll keep guard.”

  As dawn filtered through the falling snow, Luca lifted his cloak and looked at the dying girl. She was so pale and so obviously frozen that the decision made itself. Pulling his hands from his pockets, Luca held them close to the girl’s face and willed flame to dance between his fingertips.

  And then, because this was not enough, he crawled under the cloak and wrapped both cloak and himself around Tris. He was alone on a bridge with a sleeping child, her head now resting on his knees and he felt…Luca wasn’t too sure how he felt; fonder, probably, than he should have been of a creature not quite human and yet not like him either.

  (And he knew that “child” was a relative term, but the brief span of her life could not be measured against the expanse of his.)

  Baron Luca Pacioli was tired and old, despite appearances, and had come to realize he belonged neither to the civilization into which his father had been born nor to the 2023 worlds, which talked only to each other and so barely knew that Luca’s people even existed. This was hard because Luca understood at least as well as the Tsungli Yamen that he was not allowed to die until he’d been received by the Emperor, even though the Bureau of Foreign Affairs refused to accept his world existed.

  “Come on
,” Luca said, flicking his fingers to produce a flame that even he could see was less bright than it had been. “You need to wake up now.”

  And although many billions heard cold wind hum against the down ropes holding the planks on which Tris slept and a few million noticed that flakes fell oddly around a patch of snow on which the sleeping figure rested her head, none watching saw Luca or the sorrow that filled his amber eyes.

  They just saw flames come from nowhere to warm the face of the girl as her cloak seemed to gather itself tight around her. She had powers, most of those watching agreed amongst themselves, talking across great distances with a single thought. And those powers, it was then agreed, made it possible that she might reach the Forbidden City after all.

  Possible, but not likely.

  A few billion of those still not watching began to watch, while many of those who’d announced they regarded the whole affair as tawdry and insignificant began to wonder if maybe they had been wrong.

  CHAPTER 47

  Marrakech, Summer 1977

  In the end, Malika’s body found him.

  “Moz, wait,” Idries said. His face was strained, his fingers curled in on themselves, broken nails biting into his own flesh. His jellaba was filthy and his lips looked bitten.

  “Fuck off,” said Moz, not stopping.

  “Hassan is looking for you.”

  “So?” Moz threw the comment over his shoulder. Already he was pushing his way through a crowd of nasrani tourists spilling from a coach onto a pavement outside a market in Gueliz.

  “It’s about Malika.”

  Moz stopped so abruptly that one of the foreigners ran into him. Whatever she saw in the eyes of the Marrakchi kid made her step back and take a sudden interest in a display of terracotta bowls.

  “Malika?”

  “You’d better come with me.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Hassan will tell you,” Idries said. Something like fear nictated across his eyes. Something dark, something adult.

  “You tell me.”

  Idries shook his head. “Hassan will tell you,” he insisted.

  Between that market and their destination stood ten minutes of strained silence and whitewashed palm trees that flaked onto stone pavements built by the French and then abandoned along with the villas more than twenty years before. An Alsatian barked from behind a wrought-iron gate, the name on the post something European and strange. The streets became shabby as Idries led Moz away from Avenue Mohammed V towards the area around the Prison Civile, becoming smarter as Moz and Idries came out into a road that skirted Le Cimetière Européen.

  To their left was a dark slant of rock jutting from the red earth as nakedly as broken bone. Jbel Gueliz, little more than a toy mountain.

  Dogs howled, scrawny cats slunk against walls and doves fluttered around a tall, white-painted cote. They met carts laden with tomatoes and peppers and stepped aside for a farting three-wheeled truck over-crowded with sheep. A comforting smell of dung filled the air as they passed two donkeys tethered on a half-finished building plot, guarded by a boy barely half as tall as his animals.

  Moz was saying goodbye to the city without knowing it and stacking his head with fragments when he thought his mind already numbed beyond caring. Although, mostly what Moz was to recall about that afternoon was Idries two steps in front of him, head down and walking so fast that Moz could barely keep up, despite being both taller than Idries and stronger.

  The other boy was—almost literally—running away from Moz’s questions. They both understood that. Idries’s answers reduced to jagged breathing and an endless repetition of “Hassan will tell you.” Moz knew he should stop asking, just as surely as Idries realized this wasn’t going to happen. So Moz hurried along behind, his shoulders hunched and fear pressing in on him.

  On any other day he’d have been wincing at the rawness of his split lip or stripping off his T-shirt to show Malika the blood-dark bruising all over his body, only Malika…

  The physical pain Moz felt was nothing compared to his fear and both were subsumed beneath his need to arrive wherever it was Idries was taking him.

  “How far?”

  “Over there,” Idries said, pointing to a gate in a wall. Moz could see the relief in his eyes. “Hassan’s waiting inside. He’ll explain.”

  “About time.”

  “Over there,” repeated Idries and then sunk to his heels, grabbing oxygen from the hot air. Stains had blossomed under his sleeves and a dark patch spread from the centre of his chest, where sweat had soaked through the blue cotton of his cheap jellaba.

  Moz knew it was bad when Hassan came to meet him. Quite how bad he only realized when the older boy put out his hand.

  Absent-mindedly, Moz shook it and then watched Hassan step back to touch his hand to his own heart and then forehead, lifting his fingers away with a slight flick of the wrist. It was an old-fashioned, sadly formal gesture.

  “I’m sorry,” Hassan said. There was none of the usual bravado in his voice. He could have been Moz’s friend, not one of his lifelong enemies and loser of their most recent fight. “I had no idea…”

  “Where is she?”

  “Behind the Jesu.”

  This was an old statue of the nasrani god draped in the robes of a Sufi and staring up to heaven. Heat, wind and a poor choice of sandstone meant that the figure was barely recognizable.

  And the choice of location meant that whoever was responsible knew Malika’s childhood secrets. Behind the Jesu was where Moz and Malika met as children, that summer they became friends. A circle of beaten earth in the middle of a thicket of thorns. A place, even then, of crushed beer cans, soiled tissues and peeling, piss-coloured filters from stolen cigarettes. That was how Moz thought of it, when he remembered the place at all.

  “It’s bad,” Hassan said.

  Moz looked at him.

  “Whatever you’re imagining,” Hassan said, “it’s worse.” Without even thinking about it, the older boy made a sign against the evil eye. “You don’t have to see her,” Hassan added, as if he’d only just realized that. “I can ask my uncle to—”

  “She was my friend.”

  The very flatness of Moz’s voice told Hassan this was not an argument worth having, so instead he pointed to a gap between two bushes. “Through there,” he said. “I’ll be waiting. The debt is mine.”

  Settling himself against the trunk of a pine, Hassan reached into his pocket and found a packet of cigarettes. It took him three goes to get his fingers steady enough to light one of the things.

  CHAPTER 48

  Washington, Tuesday 10 July

  “How’s Ally?” asked Paula Zarte.

  “Still wants a cat.” Gene Newman’s smile was sour. “Still thinks I should be able to talk her mother into allowing it.”

  “And that stuff with the boy?”

  The President looked at his Director of the CIA. “You’re keeping tabs on Ally?”

  Paula Zarte shook her head. “Ally texted me,” she said. “Girl talk.”

  Gene Newman wasn’t sure how he felt about that. And there was something more important worrying him. “You know,” he said, “the First Lady’s not going to like this.”

  Glancing round the low-lit restaurant, Paula took in the other couples bent over their meals or gazing into each other’s eyes. A plate of squid-ink linguini sat untouched before her.

  The President had eaten two grissini, leaving crumbs all over the white linen tablecloth, and was looking doubtfully at a bowl piled high with mussels. A bottle of a good Frescobaldi Frascati was chilling in an ice bucket next to their table.

  “She’s not going to know,” Paula Zarte said.

  When Gene Newman raised his eyebrows it was in a studied, post-ironic sort of way. It was simpler than asking the question which was on his tongue. Just what the fuck did the elegant black woman in the simple Armani jacket think she was doing? She’d called him direct and they had an agreement about not doing that. What’s mor
e, she called him on his family cell phone, a number he didn’t even know she had.

  It was true he’d had an assistant her husband was seeing reassigned to duties outside the White House and he knew how outrageous that was. Paula also knew this was how it worked. In these kinds of deal it was the woman who got moved or fired, because she was invariably younger and had less powerful allies.

  If he’d had his choice, he’d have made Mike take the ambassador’s job in Ecuador but Paula was against that. Mike and he had history, which was pretty obvious really, given he’d slept with the other man’s wife.

  “Stop worrying,” Paula Zarte said. “At least, stop worrying about that. And believe me,” she said, “there are a lot more serious things for you to worry about.”

  “You think nobody’s going to talk?” The President gestured at the tables around them. He’d been sat with his back to the wall, next to a door that led through to a loading bay. One of his agents stood by the door, another guarded the loading bay and a third guarded the loading bay exit in the alley outside.

  “Of course they’re not going to talk,” Paula Zarte said. “There isn’t a single person here whose salary isn’t paid by the Agency…They’re mine,” she explained, when the President look bemused. “The place was closed for renovation. As of now it’s opened a week early.”

  Paula Zarte smiled. “The owner used to be one of ours,” she added. “It was simpler to do it this way.”

  “Simpler?”

  “It gives us deniability. Say this gets out. What’s the worst anyone can say?”

  “That we had supper together in a tiny Italian restaurant where no one in the White House has ever eaten before. One which was obviously chosen because it was out of the way.”

  “Exactly,” said Paula Zarte. “And what’s the inference?”

  “That we’re having an affair.”

  “Again.” The black woman sat back in her chair and nodded. “Believe me,” Paula Zarte said, “as rumours go that’s way better than any of the alternatives.”