Moments later, two guards marched into the great room. They laid his hand on an alabaster block. One of them expertly slammed a sabre-blade down on his little finger, neatly severing it at the base. The other laid the red-hot tip of a dagger he had heated in a mangal, a cremation brazier, across the little stump, cauterising the wound and instantly staunching the flow of blood. It was all very efficient.
That evening, to ease his pain (for he was not a man without pity) the Sultan sent a beautiful honey-eyed and amber-breasted harem girl called Safieh to deliver Sabin's food. Abducted as a child by corsairs, she had been sold into the seraglio as an ikbal, a love slave, and was the most adept at her arts. She fed him lovingly, inserting her tapered brown fingers into his waiting mouth, and sweetly played to him on her ney, which is an instrument rather like a lute. After Sabin had eaten his fill she entwined with him on the velvet cushions, and brought alive his memories of the woman he had loved (for she knew his history), and stayed with him until one hour before dawn.
It was almost worth losing a finger for.
But lest you should think that the hero of this tale is merely some passive reed, bending this way and that with the events of his life, forgetful of avenging his poor family, rest assured that he was concocting a cunning plan.
First he made a series of careful tests and calculations, just as he had for the winding of the clocks. He knew that Shay-Tarrazin and his guards had only one way of knowing if he had fulfilled his nightly task, and that was by checking that all the clocks were working, and that he had wound the last clock before the chimes of six. So Sabin started to wind each of the clocks with a single quarter-turn less, which meant that each timepiece ran down and stopped just a few moments before he reached it. He still reached the final clock on time; in fact, he arrived a fraction earlier now that there was time to spare. This made Sabin's life a little easier, but more important, it changed time by imperceptibly stretching it. As the days turned into weeks and months became years, the Sultan's interests moved on to other concepts, such as animal husbandry and flying machines, and he visited the clockhouse less and less frequently. Sabin continued to underwind the clocks, carefully allowing their mechanisms to slow, their springs to expand, their hands to shift less sharply, so that time itself geared down to a lazier pace.
The change was so slight that no-one noticed. All of the other clocks and watches in the kingdom took their time from the clockhouse, and though it was perceived that the sun and moon had altered the times of their appearance, the kingdom was so powerful and so right that it was assumed the heavens had revised their cosmic schedule in order to be more accommodating. After all, how could one measure time but from a clock, and if all the clocks ran slow who was to say that the clocks were wrong and that time itself was right? Absolute time could not be measured in any other way, particularly if one believed that earthbound humans had more power than the heavens.
For the next eight years, Sabin slowed the pace of the world. And at the age of thirty, to celebrate the anniversary of his birthyear, he took it slower still, giving each of the thousand keys a half-turn less.
Safieh, the bountiful harem girl, stayed with him four more times. Her appearance was a mixed blessing, for it meant that he had lost another finger, but he would experience a night of love. The clocks were subject to imperfection, and occasionally broke down. When this happened the royal blacksmiths forged new cogs and wires, and Sabin replaced the damaged part once he had concluded his tour for the night.
Incredibly, it failed to come to the attention of the ageing Omar Mehmet Shay-Tarrazin that his kingdom had fallen out of step. It had grown so lethargic that his ships sat docked in the Bosphorus for months on end, their cargoes rotting, their crews drunk and asleep. His Grand Vizier, that is to say his prime minister, passed his days sweating in the hamam with his favourite concubine, and no longer bothered concerning himself with affairs of state, because they were resolved too slowly. Those states whose borders touched the Sultan's empire withdrew their trading agreements and found new allies. The slave girls that peered beneath the jalousie-screens into the mabeyn area of the palace grew fat and bored, for they were visited with more vigour in times of prosperity (men always sought to prove their sexual prowess after proving their trading acumen). The peacocks in the formal gardens of the palace wandered through the overgrown lawns tearing out their feathers through inattention. The very air ceased to buzz with the energy of insects, and even the battalions of ferocious ants that swarmed across the flagstoned embankments now droned as softly as bees in an English garden. Lassitude settled over the kingdom like a warm dry shroud.
Finally, when Sabin had reduced the clocks to their slowest possible rate, he requested an audience with the Sultan, and built a special royal viewing platform upon which to receive his guest.
The reply, borne on petal-scented paper from across the courtyard, took five full days to reach him. Sabin watched from his window, and finally saw Shay-Tarrazin's entourage moving as slowly as a constellation toward the clockhouse. The Sultan had grown old and bewildered. His rheumy eyes peeped out from beneath a huge turquoise turban that had a feather dipped in molten gold attached to it with an eagle-claw. To Sabin, the Sultan's willingness to visit the clockhouse upon request was a sure sign of how far the empire had fallen into disarray. Once, Shay-Tarrazin's most gossamer caprice would have been set in stone. Now, too much time had made him lose his will and his way.
Upon sighting Sabin he slowly – so slowly – held out his jewel-encrusted hands and warmly clasped his arm.
'Ah, my loyal clockwinder!' he exclaimed. 'How – how -' But here he lost the thread of this simple exercise in conversation, and his unfocussed eyes drifted up to study a lizard on the ceiling as he sought to regain his topic.
'How runs your kingdom?' prompted Sabin.
'Indeed.' The Sultan smiled vaguely. Behind him, several members of his retinue had begun to fall asleep standing up, their chins slumping on their breastplates.
'Why, this room is the heart of your kingdom, sire,' said Sabin, bowing low. 'If you would care to step upon my platform and listen carefully, you may hear its beat.'
And with that he climbed the steps and cupped his ear, bidding the Sultan to follow his example. Unaware of the impertinence, Shay-Tarrazin followed Sabin's example and listened, and came to realise that the ticking of the thousand clocks mirrored the slow, slow beat of his own weary heart, and now the concept of time that had so long eluded him became clear. For his fogged brain realised that true time was a personal thing, the measurement of each man's life on earth.
And with that, the first of the thousand clocks stopped. The Sultan and his retinue noticed nothing, but Sabin's finely tuned ear registered the absence.
Then another clock stopped.
And another.
And another.
And another.
So that the dense sound of ticking was gradually stripped away, like members of a performing orchestra laying down their instruments one after the next. The Sultan was paralysed by the phenomenon. With each stopped clock his heart grew a thousandth part weaker. After eight years, Sabin was winding the clocks so little that time's elasticity had been stretched to breaking point.
Shay-Tarrazin's eyes widened in horror as he dimly realised that his life must cease with the stopping of the final clock, and that for him, as it eventually did for everyone, time would soon terminate altogether. The ticking grew thinner and thinner as pendulums stilled, movements stopped moving, gems and sand and water ceased to pour, suns and moons no longer followed one another, and as the hands of the last clock ceased their movement around its calibrated surface, the Sultan's heartbeat demurred to the point of extinction, his body seizing into silence. He fell gently from the platform, cushioned by his saffron robes, into the great gold-filigree case of his best-loved Ormolu clock, where he lay unaided by his snoozing retinue.
As Sabin was the only man in the kingdom who had learned to master time, he assumed t
he responsibility of helping to bury the Sultan and attend his mourning rituals. Even the Grand Vizier (once he could be found and woken) agreed that this was appropriate and seemly.
The clocks were never wound again. The once-great empire of Omar Mehmet Shay-Tarrazin never emerged from its reverie. Sabin Darr was finally granted the freedom of the kingdom. He resolved to return to his village, and requested the slave-girl Safieh as a reward for his unstinting loyalty to the Sultan. The Grand Vizier was happy to grant him this, and to seal good fortune on the couple's union, presented them with a golden clock.
The hands of the clock did not move. Its interior mechanism had been removed, and the case had been filled with diamonds and sapphires.
For Sabin Darr, who had lost his family and his fingers, but not his sense of time, the world started to revolve once more.
INNER FIRE
He had been gingerly attempting to unfold a copy of the Sunday Times, but the newspaper snapped apart in his hands and shattered into dozens of pieces. Kallie swore angrily as he shovelled the shards into a pile with his boot; some of the broken edges were razor-sharp. There was nothing else to read in the apartment except his father's books, but there was no way of getting them off the shelves without a blowtorch, which he figured would somewhat defeat the object. Someone had given him some old magazines, but these were now stuck fast to the kitchen table, their covers rippled together in a lurid mosaic.
Kallie wondered how much longer Bennett would be. He had gone to the shops three days ago – or was it four? Perhaps he'd run into friends and gone to stay with them. Well, good riddance. Bennett had been camping out on the sofa for over two months now. Not bad for a guy who was 'just passing through the neighbourhood'. He had supposedly called in to see how his old schoolfriend was faring, but in the last eight weeks all he had done was empty the larder and try to repair the refrigerator. The refrigerator! Why in the name of everything perverse would he want to do that? The only reason Kallie hadn't thrown it out into the hall was because it would not fit through the kitchen door, which his father had replaced after drunkenly burning the old one two years ago.
He walked over to the window and rubbed away a patch of ice with the back of his glove. Across the street was the bus depot where no buses ever ran. Not too many people passed by, either. Most had learned their lesson the hard way, leaving the comparative warmth of their homes only to become disoriented in the blizzards and stumble into snowdrifts. It didn't take long for a body to cool down in these temperatures. His father had been fond of describing a time when you could see the curving green meadow of Primrose Hill from the bedroom windows. All Kallie had ever seen was a perpetual ice-haze hanging in the air, obscuring a sun that at its best was as watery as an uncooked egg.
There seemed little point in trying to lead a normal life now. Everything conspired against it. The solution, his eternally optimistic father had always told him, was to stay busy. Edward had stayed busy right until the end, refusing to acknowledge the fact that he was slowing down, moving with ever-increasing decrepitude, like a clockwork toy at the end of its winding. Finally he had overestimated his stamina on a trip to town and had failed to make it back to safety before a storm of truly biblical proportions had set in. The blizzard lasted for over three months. When it subsided, the landscape had changed its proportions entirely, and his father had presumably become part of the great permafrost ridge that separated North London from the city centre.
Kallie realised with a shock that he was cold. Cold. Normally the word held little meaning. It was a permanent state of being, an endless dull ache in his bones, a spiteful stinging in his nerve ends, a dead sensation that dragged at his limbs, numbing his extremities, slowing his brain and thickening his blood. He forced himself to think. It was his only defence against the pervasive cold. Physical exercise brought only a temporary respite, sweat turning to icewater. He looked about the barren grey room, as uninviting as a Soviet state flat, and forced himself to think.
The only problem with Bennett not coming back was that Bennett had taken his wallet, ostensibly to buy food. The reason for deciding to trust a man who had never shown an ounce of reliability was obscure to him now. He looked over at the telephone, willing it to ring. It wouldn't, of course, even if Bennett had bothered to note the number. The mechanism was encrusted in ice, as indeed was the entire exchange, although he had heard a rumour that certain members of parliament could still operate some kind of closed circuit telecommunication system – presumably for use in emergencies.
Well, what was it now if not an emergency? The entire apartment, the entire apartment complex, the entire city, the entire country was frozen solid, and had been for twenty-two years, and with each passing year it grew a little colder, a little more still and silent, as the national heartbeat slowed to a weak and distanced blip.
Kallie was twenty-four years old, but held no memory of those fabulous sun-soaked times before the great freeze. Like a man blind from birth, he had not even been granted the pleasure of memories. Bennett was a year or so older, and swore he could recall laying in long grass with the sun in his eyes, so light and bright it hurt to look into the sky. But almost everything that came out of his mouth was a lie. He said he had seen shops open in Oxford Street. He said he knew people who could take them South, far beyond the reach of the ice. He said if they waited inside long enough the government would find a way to make it warmer. All lies. But he was right about one thing; they could not survive without food. That was why Kallie let him go. They had been living on beans and tinned luncheon meat, which was edible if you made a couple of holes in the lid of the can and gently heated it over the stove. But ten days ago the last gas ring had ceased to work, even though the council had promised to keep the pipes clear. There was no news coming in at all now that Mr Jakobowski had stopped calling by. Perhaps it was over; the last warm body had chilled to a blue cadaver and the city was finally a postcard snowscape.
And perhaps Bennett had found a pub open somewhere and was spending his money with a bunch of his drunken mates. Kallie knew there was nothing for it but to find out for himself and go outside. He would certainly die if he stayed here. His last source of heat – the gas ring – had packed in. The electricity still worked intermittently, but there were no electric radiators to be had, not unless you were rich enough to buy one on the black market. There was nothing left to eat except boxes of dry cereal, and he hadn't any milk to put on them. In the last few days, the temperature in the apartment had plunged, although he imagined it was still a long way above the subzeros in the street below. It hadn't helped that he had thrown his typewriter through the window in a fit of temper two days ago. The keys had jammed, and he lacked the patience – and the required agility of his numbed fingers – to repair it. What alarmed him more was the fact that he no longer really cared what happened to him. It would be easy to escape this bitter place; he just had to open all the windows, remove his greatcoat and lay down on the bed for a few minutes. Perhaps that was his only choice. But not just yet. Not before he visited the outside world one last time.
He added an itchy red woollen sweater to the other layers of his clothing, then wound a scarf around his chest. Over this he struggled into his greatcoat, dug out leather gloves with split seams, tucked his jeans into the tops of his battered Caterpillar boots.
When he unlatched the front door and looked out, he was surprised to find snow drifting in the hall. It had been nearly two months since his last foray into the streets of what had once recognisably been Camden Town. The tall windows at the end of the floor had been broken by children, and the snow had formed a drift below the sill. If any of his neighbours still lived in the building, they were not prepared to answer his knock. Kallie rapped on Mr Jakobowski's door and listened with his ear placed to the peeling brown paintwork.
'Mr Jakobowski, I'm going outside. Do you want me to get you anything?'
He was sure he could hear someone moving around in the sitting room, but what could he
do if the old man wasn't prepared to let anyone help him? In these strange times, who knew how people would behave? Something electrical hummed beyond the door. It sounded as if he had a radiator running in there. People jealously hoarded their heat sources. Who could blame them? Heat was hard to share; if you opened the circle it dissipated. He called a few more times, then gave up. In the past, when he had found anything he thought the old man might like, he would haul it home and leave it against his door. But the good-neighbour rules were no longer in force; now it was every man for himself.
Down the icy stairwell – the lift had not worked in thirteen years – to the front door, which was so frozen shut that Kallie assumed no-one had been in or out since Bennett had left with the contents of his wallet. Deadening whiteness glared in through the window panels. He would need to find sunglasses. He had tried to pick up ski equipment from Lillywhites the last time he was in town, but – surprise, surprise – they had sold out. Only a handful of staff still manned the store, keeping up the old conventions. He had worked there himself once, bored out of his mind, waiting to seize upon the odd straggling customer who had made it in through the snow. That was back when the market was still trying to cope with the crisis, when the rich warm nations were still exporting to their poor frozen neighbours. Now that those neighbours had ceased to earn wages, there was no point in supplying them with affordable products. The milk of human kindness had been the first thing to freeze.
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