The Promise of the Child

by Tom Toner

  He saw Sonerila and the boys sitting beneath a Midsumnal wine tree, chopping bulbs from its silver lower branches and dropping them into a basket. Lycaste crept close, hidden now and then by the sculpted topiary.

  “Just the largest ones,” the servant said, taking the scissors from the taller boy, Papaver. “Just enough to fill the basket.”

  The boys sorted through the bulbs while she watched.

  “That’s enough. You can take the smaller fruit home with you.”

  “Why does he always eat alone?” asked the younger of the brothers after a moment, sitting and staring out to sea.

  “He doesn’t always eat alone.”

  “Pentas doesn’t join him any more.”

  Sonerila looked at him, finally placing her scissors into the basket beside the pile of pale silver bulbs. “Take these to the solar—leave them on the table.”

  Lycaste watched them carry the bundle into his house while he rubbed at the sand on his long legs.

  “Why not just give everything away, Sonerila?” he suggested, walking out from behind the tree.

  Her elongated face turned to him without surprise. Sonerila always had a talent for knowing precisely where he was at any particular time; perhaps that was why his mother had chosen her to stay on. “A reward for their help. I get precious little from anyone else around here.”

  He moved out of the shadows to examine a manicured tree. “They came for the gossip.”

  “And I gave them fruit instead.”

  “You should have given them these.” He held out a branch dangling off-white berries. “They’re turning.”

  Sonerila looked at him, her long head dappled in shadow. “Is she coming tonight?”

  He sat and stretched out on the grass, arms behind his head in poor imitation of ease, then considered the helper, half his face in bright sunlight that forced him to squint. “I hope she will. I don’t know.”

  The bird smiled just as a lady might, pretty dimples forming at the corners of her beak. “How could she refuse a face like that?”

  Lycaste smiled back, shading his eyes and looking past her. The boys were trotting down the slope from the house towards them, their purloined wine packaged up in waxed paper parcels from the kitchens.

  “Hello, Master Lycaste.”

  “Catch anything today?” he asked them, always unsure how to talk to children beyond a certain age.

  “Three big fish on Lesser Point, for Master Impatiens’s table.” The boy and his brother exchanged glances. “Old Jotroffe was there again. Papaver’s taller than him now.”

  “And how is he?” asked Sonerila.

  “Strange, as usual. He swam with us, kept asking about the sharks—if we’d seen any recently.”

  Lycaste looked between them. “You swim at the Point?”

  “All the time.”

  “And have you? Seen any?”

  “No, just porpoises. Hey, want to buy anything? We brought the cart.”

  Lycaste shook his head. The cart was always full of junk. The quality objects they hauled from estate to estate were nearly always gone by the time they reached the beach, all the best stuff taken. Lycaste was beginning to doubt there was even anything decent in there at the start; the one time he’d found a usable plastic figure for his palace they’d hiked the price. The boys hoped to start work in Impatiens’s export business in a year or two, possibly with the prospect of travelling to the next Province every now and then as things progressed. Perhaps then they’d stop ripping him off.

  He glanced up at the sunlight shining through the emerald leaves, already masking their chatter as his thoughts turned to the previous few days. Of all the help kept on, Sonerila was his favourite. She was always there to comfort him, to give him the best advice. Once the boys had gone he’d be able to talk to her properly; she would know what to do.

  *

  The house was half-submerged in the garden itself, a few acres of sculpted trees rising smoothly up the stepped sides of a grass-covered hummock. Five bell-shaped towers grew from the low hill, peeling white stone structures strung with lanterns and ruddy bougainvillea. The flowers hummed in the breeze as the evening ripened, enhanced chambers in their bracts hauntingly reverberating to different chords.

  Backing off the beach, the estate gave way in each direction to rolling hills and groves of subtropical jungle, now wild again after generations tamed. Lycaste strolled through the orchard towards one of the white towers with Sonerila at his side, listening. The screams from the woodland to the east were loud this evening, echoing from the broad, curved walls of the closest towers.

  He slowed and turned. Something didn’t feel right. A sensation he hadn’t experienced since childhood: someone was observing him, watching him as he walked. Heat on the back of his neck, almost physically creeping across his skin. Lycaste looked up at the hills, as if expecting to see someone in the darkness of the undergrowth, but the day was late, the shadows grown deep.

  As he neared a slim archway at the base of the tower, his body darkened quickly, like glass suddenly polarised. The tone of his skin settled on a matt charcoal before switching rapidly through a tight spectrum, the colours churning together over his body like mixing paint. After a second, his skin evened to a milky blue, mirroring the fading light in the sky. Lycaste paused to look at his hand, watching the last of the colour tinge his fingers, then went inside.

  Impatiens called it a doll’s house whenever he saw it, but it was much more than that. Lycaste pulled out his favourite chair and sat down, taking up his paintbrush from its pot of water and a section of the extension he had begun building last month. He turned it in the evening light, looking for the unpainted window frames he remembered needed doing, waiting for the lamps to awaken around him. At his side stood dozens of stoppered blue jars and bottles filled with trinkets and tools, most of them gifts from the birds whenever they went into Mersin. He dabbed at some white paint, applying it carefully as the lights woke up, beating to the rhythm of his heart and relaxing into a rich glow. He finished a window frame and sat back.

  The whole piece had taken him seven years. It reached almost to the ceiling of the large chamber, an idealised house fit for a Province prince. Inside were hundreds of figures and animals, all individually painted and with full Melius names and stories of their own. Lycaste reached in and picked up a few of the earliest figurines, scrutinising each one in turn and laying them in a row with some others. His painting skills had improved slowly over the years, and these had begun to look a little crude, as if a child had made them. Briza, Drimys’s young son, occasionally asked if he could help Lycaste with his work, but the boy was absolutely forbidden. He’d caught the child playing with the house once, in the days when he still left the door to the chamber unlocked, and banned him from the whole top floor of the tower. This was his, and only his.

  Lycaste carefully moved the figures to one side, counting them under his breath as he did so, to make space for the extension, which he placed on a folded square of stained white linen. The prince needed more space in his palace for all his new pets, a number of which Lycaste had just made. He reached under the table for the metal tray of powdered colourings, pausing to look at them as he put them on the table. They were a gift from her, after he’d finally found the courage to show her this locked-away place.

  He barely heard the knock on the door. Impatiens pushed it open an inch and peered in.

  “How’s your doll’s house, Lycaste?”

  “It’s a palace,” he muttered, dipping his brush in the water pot.

  “My mistake.” Impatiens surveyed the model for a moment, as if looking for something. “Did you find my—”

  “Yes, thank you.” Lycaste dug in a drawer and handed him the skeletal, rather mummified body of a lizard he’d found set upon the miniature dining table one morning, the tiny figures arranged around it as if at a great feast. “I’ve made my own food for the table.” He indicated the painted bowls and cups, some tiny coloured beads and
woollen balls placed inside them with tweezers.

  “They must get fairly hungry, locked away up here.”

  Lycaste wiped his hands and went back to his painting, ignoring the man.

  Impatiens sighed and rubbed his great bushy beard, listening to the rattle and clatter of preparations downstairs. “It sounds like your dinner party’s happening without you. Coming down?”

  Lycaste nodded, reluctantly setting aside the paintbrush and practising his breathing techniques. Old, familiar butterflies rose to dance in his stomach at the thought of having to entertain guests, fluttering more manically still as he glanced at the paint tin, knowing she might have already arrived.

  “You can’t swim at the Point.”

  “The Lesser Point, they said.”

  “Still—”

  Drimys pushed his plate away, leaning back and staring at the vaulted white ceiling of the dining room. “You don’t think the boys were just trying to impress you?”

  Lycaste glanced at both men and shrugged. He’d done little more than pick at each of the many courses of his supper, relieved and yet disappointed that only two guests had arrived after all. “They told me they saw Jotroffe out there again.”

  “Now there’s an odd creature,” said Impatiens, leaning to cut into the vast block of fruit-studded cheese in the middle of the table. “Even looks strange, doesn’t he?”

  Lycaste could only agree. He’d met the man many times, usually when he was out walking, though the hermit appeared to take care never to make a habit of trespassing, despite the boundaries of Lycaste’s land being exceedingly poorly marked. Jotroffe was extremely short, like a child, willowy and slender, though almost certainly not young; anyone who spoke to him could see that. His face was deformed, unfinished somehow, like seeing your reflection in a small concave mirror. His speech, though understandable, took a very long time to form, the words following each other with an agonising slowness that could snare unwary travellers into a whole afternoon’s conversation.

  “The last time I saw the fellow, we talked about the weather for most of the morning,” muttered Impatiens, spreading the cheese carefully onto a biscuit, “then finished with a good long session on whether walnuts were superior to cashews. His eventual opinion? After all that? That they were ‘most assuredly of equal merit.’ Astonishing.”

  “It was ‘optimum fingernail length’ when I met him at the port,” said Drimys, burping gently into his hand. “No more than three inches of white among polite society, I’m reliably informed.”

  “Was he always like that?” asked Lycaste, still regarded as an outsider by most residents of the Province despite having lived by the beach for almost twenty years. He looked at his own long nails, polished and clipped that evening in expectation of Pentas’s arrival.

  “Ever since I’ve known him,” Impatiens said. “They say he bored the crew of a ship from Brindisi into throwing him off here, but he won’t ever tell you his own story. That I’d wait all day to hear.”

  Lycaste stirred the remaining food on his plate with a long fork, mushing it all together. “Do you think he’s just trying to get home?”

  “I can’t imagine they’d want him back,” Impatiens said and rubbed his whiskers, apparently remembering something. The eyes in his great, gnarled face lit up. “Did you see what those boys gave me today?” He stood, walking into the next room and producing a brace of fish from a basket. “I don’t recognise them.” He slapped them on a salver in the middle of the table, a large iron hook still fastening the catch together. Lycaste thought they looked like the deep-sea creatures sometimes caught in Mersin, all teeth and eyes.

  “What did you give them?” asked Drimys, pulling one from the hook and peeling its lips back to see inside its mouth.

  “They owed me.” He took the remaining fish from the plate and stretched its fin back to expose the spines, letting it flop back into place. Its wide, pale eyes were frozen in a startled expression. “Might be worth something up in Karaoz.”

  Lycaste detected the onset of merchant-speak, laying down his fork and folding his unused napkin carefully. Soon they would be discussing pounds or ounces or similarly opaque things, the stuff of grown men to which Lycaste—who had never really understood trade at all, having inherited everything when he came of age—felt hardly able to contribute. As far as he saw it, his gardens grew plenty of whatever he required, from delicate cuts of grown meat to fruit, plastics and metal ores. If anything needed to be bought for the house the helpers did it, leaving Lycaste written receipts of trade that he barely looked at before they were filed away in a cupboard somewhere.

  He went to the wall and rang a small bell on a chain to let the birds know there was work to be done. Those two would talk all night, forgetting Lycaste was there entirely.

  “It must be deeper out there, at Lesser Point. Could be as good a place as any to start,” Drimys was saying.

  “Start what?” Lycaste asked, ringing the bell again. Something about Drimys’s expression had caught his attention.

  “The fish only grow large enough at the Points,” Impatiens said, lifting one of the creatures from the platter again and miming a little dance, wriggling its fins. Both of them began to laugh.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Impatiens and Drimys fell silent after a moment, considering him. “You wouldn’t like it,” said Impatiens, putting down the fish.

  “Like what?”

  He turned to Drimys, who was avoiding eye contact as he refilled his glass. “Shall we tell him?”

  Lycaste was losing his patience. He pulled on the bell a few more times and waited for an answer.

  “How strong is your boat, Lycaste?” Drimys asked, glancing up finally.

  He looked at them both, uncertain if they were playing a joke on him. The two men appeared serious enough in the dim light. “It hasn’t fallen apart yet. Why? Do you want to take it out?”

  “It can hold three, can’t it?”

  “I think so.”

  Impatiens glanced at Drimys again. “I say we take him along—it’s his boat.”

  His friend and business partner looked unconvinced.

  “Look, Lycaste—” Impatiens gestured for him to sit “—we’ve come up with a sort of adventure. Use of your boat, if you grant it, should in fairness get you a place on the crew.”

  “We never discussed who’s captain,” said Drimys suddenly.

  Impatiens frowned. “I think you’ll find we did. I’ve a much greater knowledge of the coastline.” He turned his attention back to Lycaste, shaking his head. “Anyway, it’s Midsummer. There’s a lot of fish about. That means those sharks should be back.”

  Lycaste stared at them, unsure again. “All right.”

  “It’ll be dangerous,” said Drimys, sitting forward.

  “Yes,” said Impatiens, “but we’re going to take precautions, we’re going to plan this down to the smallest detail.”

  “Plan what?” asked Lycaste, exasperated. He looked at their expectant faces. “You mean to catch a shark? The way the boys catch fish at the Point?”

  “Exactly.” Impatiens raised his blond, tangled eyebrows. “You can be armourer.” He glanced back at Drimys, who was shaking his head. “Chief armourer,” he added.

  “But nobody’s seen one for a year or more,” Lycaste said, knowing that might not be true. “You think they’re out there now?”

  Drimys pointed at Impatiens. “Like my most esteemed partner said, it’s Midsummer. They’re out there.”

  Lycaste stuck a finger in his mouth, worrying the nail. “I don’t know about this.”

  Drimys smirked at Impatiens as he arranged his cutlery. “I told you he’d say that.”

  “Why do you need my boat?” Lycaste asked. “Can’t you use Ipheon’s?”

  “His needs mending,” Impatiens admitted sheepishly, looking at his empty plate. “Just think—we’d be famous. People would come from miles around to see!”

  “Why would I want people
to come from miles around?” The idea terrified Lycaste more than any shark could.

  “I forgot—you get that sort of attention already. But we have a business, Drimys and I. We’re gentlemen of prospects. It would be excellent publicity, at the very least.”

  Lycaste met Impatiens’s eye, something he rarely did with anyone. “I don’t need more people at my door.”

  Impatiens nodded solemnly, his gaze flicking to the table. “You won’t even lend us your boat?”

  Lycaste rose from his chair. “Excuse me.”

  He walked slowly, weaving through the whispering fruit trees, sometimes craning his neck to look at the spray of cold stars and the green half-moon that had begun to rise over the hills, its light staining them with artificial colour.

  Pentas’s absence struck him as more loaded a gesture than anything she could have possibly said, and he’d felt the weight of her scorn with each glance at the empty place-setting. He reached the edge of the water—green-tinged waves that bled to black lapping gently at the stones, still warm when he dipped his foot in—and looked up nervously from the sand, knowing before he did so that there would be no one to see. He carried on along the beach with one foot in the water, deliberately going in the opposite direction from where she might be—as if the reverie might subconsciously carry him to her.

  Lycaste had contemplated leaving, perhaps returning to Kipris Isle for a year or two, but he could hardly show his face there, either. His eyes moved unseeing across the jungle of indifferent stars, wondering where he could go. There were trade ships docked in the ports of the Tenth Province that might take a wealthy traveller anywhere within the Nostrum—Fouad, Tripol, even past Tunizerres and as far as the Westerly Provinces—but such a journey would be long and likely fraught with danger. Lycaste knew he hadn’t the stomach for travel, just as everyone said. After five miles he’d be pining for home, trembling and sick from the sea.

  The moon had now risen fully, its dense whorls of cloud shrouding whatever mysterious things went on up there. His feet met grass and he looked up to see that he was back in the orchard, walking slowly through an irregular grove of young trees. He hadn’t known love could be so draining, so demanding. The stories he read had never explained what it did to you when it left, how much it stole as it drifted away.