The Promise of the Child

by Tom Toner

  Lycaste pushed the door fully open with the tip of the knife, noticing the sharp smell of burning plastic just as he saw the interior of his palace. Three of the figures were alight, their bodies bubbling and running beneath little plumes of black smoke. He ran to the model, searching for a rag or anything that would smother the flames in the boxes under the huge table that held the palace up.

  Something hit him hard on the nape of his neck. Lycaste fell forwards, head slamming into the table leg, dropping the knife. His feet were pulled from under him.

  “This is what happens, Lycaste,” said Callistemon’s voice behind him. “This is what happens when you insult a man of the Second.” He grabbed Lycaste under the armpits and hauled him to the window while he was still stunned. Lycaste opened his eyes and stared at the flames engulfing his precious palace. Now two whole rooms were alight, the fire climbing from surface to surface, floor to floor.

  “Look at me!” The slap was hard, jerking Lycaste’s attention back to Callistemon. The Plenipotentiary pointed to the flames. “This will burn until you tell me where it is.”

  “Where what is?” he managed.

  The second blow was less of a surprise and hurt more. Lycaste felt his freshly healed nose splinter again, by now familiar with the sensation. He breathed thickly through the blood and tried his hardest not to make a sound.

  “It doesn’t really matter. You can’t open it.” Callistemon’s face became clearer as Lycaste’s eyes adjusted. It looked freckled in the light, like a banana that had begun to turn.

  He heaved his arm from the man’s grip and struck pathetically, Callistemon intercepting it easily in the dark. The Plenipotentiary clamped his fingers around Lycaste’s slender wrist and bent it back. He couldn’t stop the whimper as it escaped.

  A humourless smile appeared on Callistemon’s lips. “Theft and striking a representative. There’s a revolutionary in you after all.”

  Lycaste stole a glance at the fire, now tasting the roof of the palace. “All right!” he yelped. “I had it—I can get it back.”

  Callistemon leaned away to look at him, his face defined suddenly in the light of the fire. “Who has the case now?”

  What Lycaste had taken to be dirt before was dried blood, caked and scabbed across the bridge of the man’s nose. “I can get it for you,” he said, his eyes flicking to the palace again, knowing it might earn him another blow. “Just put the fire out!”

  Callistemon wiped his face and inspected his hand while he restrained Lycaste. “I knew there was something unusual about you, Lycaste, the instant I met you.” He glanced to the fire, watching it spread to another room. “You have that shyness that afflicts young men who aren’t brought up correctly. Maybe something else, too.” He smiled as Lycaste struggled, watching in horror as more miniature rooms became engulfed. “A touch of the syndrome, I think?” He took Lycaste’s face roughly in his hands and leaned closer, his soft voice and musty breath tickling Lycaste’s nose. “If you thought your difficulties would absolve you of responsibility, though, you’re wrong.”

  The fire was growing very hot now, precious years of his life expended only in heating a room. Lycaste watched the roof collapse in a flurry of sparks that threatened his tapestries and looked back at Cal-listemon, an ember of rage igniting inside him as if it had floated from the burning palace.

  He roared in fury, the man’s grip tightening in surprise. “You took her from me! The only person I ever loved!”

  Callistemon’s eyes widened as Lycaste yanked his hand free of the Plenipotentiary’s grip and grabbed the man’s neck, swinging him around and slamming his head against the wall. He was surprised for a moment at how light his attacker was, realising as he shoved Callistemon into the stone again that the Plenipotentiary was a good deal smaller than him. Callistemon forced himself away from the wall, swinging a fist. The two gripped each other, swaying and staggering back towards the open window. Callistemon raised his fist again, but not before Lycaste shoved him hard to one side.

  The man disappeared as if the wall had suddenly dissolved. Lycaste steadied himself, confused for a moment, finally placing his hand on the lintel of the window that he’d forgotten was there to peer out.

  Somewhere in the darkness the waves sighed over pebbles. He stared down into the black orchard, searching for any sign of Callistemon. A crackle from the fire brought his attention back to the palace and he ripped a hanging from the wall, staggering across to throw it over the fire. He pulled it off when he was sure the flames had been smothered, inspecting the remains of the palace uselessly in the now dark room.

  The silence rushed back in, dampening his adrenalin. Lycaste returned to the window, looking down.

  Surely he hadn’t. At the bottom of the tower, perhaps thirty feet below, he could just make out Callistemon’s prone form. He looked at the black remains of his model once more before carefully descending the stairs.

  Lycaste knew that breath was an indicator of life, and bent his head down carefully to Callistemon’s mouth when he came upon him, straining to listen. His own heartbeat drowned out anything he might have heard. He needed light, but the tower’s hanging lanterns were not responding to the movement of his blood. The bastard must have done something to the kinetics.

  Lycaste tried to remember where he might find the pulse—somewhere on the face, he supposed, that was where most of the body’s blood went. Lycaste grimaced as his thumbs kneaded the man’s motionless flesh, warm and unresponsive.

  “You can’t hide this.” Elcholtzia looked even more drained than usual. “Someone’s going to come looking for him, sooner or later.”

  Lycaste gazed at the flaking wall miserably.

  “You’re well known here,” said Elcholtzia as he gazed out of his window into the pre-dawn blue. “Nobody’s going to say anything, but that doesn’t mean it’ll go away.”

  Lycaste chanced a look at Elcholtzia, noticing he hadn’t said well liked. “We could say anything—tell them a shark got him, just like Drimys.”

  Elcholtzia pursed his lips. “The people who will come for Callistemon will have tools, things to bring the truth out of you and anyone who cares enough about you to perpetuate a lie.”

  Lycaste cradled his battered head in his hands, distraught. “What would you have me do, then? What would you do?”

  Elcholtzia rubbed his weathered face but did not answer. Lycaste was about to repeat himself when the old man said: “You haven’t many options. Stay and face the consequences—whatever they may be, and however far in the future—or leave. They will never find you if you go. You can start again, you’re young.”

  “But I’d lose everything!” Lycaste cried.

  “Everyone loses everything, eventually.”

  Lycaste pressed his hand to his eyes, the knuckles sore. Believing that any of it was actually happening was still difficult. It was only in the moments between talking that his mind could take stock and understand what had gone on.

  “What will they do to me if I stay?”

  “Other Plenipotentiaries? I don’t know. There was murder in the Seventh, once. There was a trial.”

  “And I’ve killed one of their own,” he said, almost hoping Elcho-ltzia would contradict him, but he didn’t. There was no choice at all, really, once that part was considered.

  “Can I say my farewells?”

  “That’s not up to me, Lycaste.”

  He thought about it. To do anything more than disappear would be to put those he cared about at risk. He couldn’t go back and say goodbye.

  “I’ll have to write a note,” he admitted wretchedly, glancing out of the window at the ethereal early-morning gloom. “Like a coward.”

  Leaving Home

  Lycaste tried to avoid losing sight of the coast for as long as he could, grimly walking the crescent of hills to the dirt path and its dusty crossroads. Some wild goats and a scrofulous-looking cockerel held court at the crossing, scattering at a trot as he arrived. He watched them make their way dow
n the hill and turned north-east into the dawn forest, cutting into the trees from the ancient path long overgrown.

  When at last he turned to look, the green sea was gone. His eyes stung and he hefted his pack, Callistemon’s case tied to it and jostling painfully against his hip. Birds and animals in the trees whistled and sang as he recalled what he’d written in his farewell note, going through the tightly packed lines in his head to make sure they’d been right. There was no time to change them now.

  Lycaste stared at his dirty feet as they took him away from home; each step harder to turn back from as time crawled on and the forest awoke. What he’d done no longer screamed in his mind, instead appearing to have been absorbed uniformly throughout: a dirty rain cloud under which he travelled. He could return; burn the note, perhaps even burn the body—it was still within his modest powers to change things for the better. His eyes wandered from his feet as they paused, attempting to picture how it could be done, seeing the rising light colouring the topmost branches of the date palms. But Elcholtzia was right. His crime was bound to catch up with him eventually, and by then others would pay the price, too.

  He descended into the tangled crevices of the jungle, trying to keep the sun to his right. He knew enough not to get lost, and was glad. To stumble out like a simpleton back where he’d started would be an ignominious end to his already poor excuse for an escape plan.

  Perfumes hung dense in the depths of this world, parting warmly around him; bulbous and dripping fruit dangled everywhere like baubles, the thud of their fall beating a quiet rhythm for miles around in the still morning. Pale honey and black syrup drizzled over his forehead in runnels; cream seeped and bleached frayed trunks. Lycaste spied clusters of every food from his garden hanging darkly in the canopies and brushing his shoulders: sowberries and even sowsage, bullberries, kidneypears, droplings and starchfruit. Bunches of wild eggs, green and yellow and blue, popped from flowered shrubs to confuse the birds. Lycaste had heard tales of them hatching, just as spiders were supposed to grow inside old potatoes (or so Impatiens said). The Menyanthes jungle could give him everything he needed. He could reach that rotten log ahead, sit down and live out the rest of his life not four miles from home. But that was no good. It would be like hiding in the garden—he’d be found in days. Beyond the forest were places where he could settle for a while and think properly about things, before perhaps moving on, though actual settlements were probably out of the question for some time.

  Lycaste had not been out into the Menyanthes for more than a year, and even then only a handful of times before, but he was fairly sure that it was less than a full day’s walk to the borders. The landscape that followed was meadow, he seemed to recall, gouged with valleys that he’d stood to admire but never ventured into. Beyond that, the blue haze. That was where he’d go.

  A mosquito whined under his nose and he flinched, suddenly conscious of the possibility of being drained like a wrung washcloth if he didn’t get out of the jungle before nightfall. Disturbed ebony dragonflies zipped about him curiously, a few peeling apart from gluey airborne embraces, but he knew those didn’t bite. In the highest orchids, scintillating gold beetles lumbered from rubbery petals and split at the wings, hovering out of his path, and something splashed for cover in an unseen pool, the shadow-dappled world alive with things too fast for him to see.

  Lycaste looked up at the canopies, brooding on something that had struck him just as he entered the forest. As far as he knew, he was the only Lycaste in the Tenth or the Ninth, but there was no way of knowing how far he’d be hunted. There were fictional names from books and plays that he could of course steal, but he would have to choose one that wasn’t well known. He’d already played with the vague logic of going by Callistemon, figuring anyone on his trail wouldn’t think to enquire after that name—it would be a kind of trophy; he’d won it in a fair fight against a villain who no longer needed it, after all. The whole idea carried a perverse sense of triumph that he wasn’t used to, having never won anything before. But no, it would just make things worse. It was a Second name and would attract attention like a forest fire. Even if he was never found out and his life went on and on for as long as he might expect, Lycaste would have to live forever hearing that name and remembering what he’d done. He might as well carry the man’s rotting head around with him in a bag.

  He wondered if the body had been found yet, if the search for the murderer had begun. Lycaste guessed it was the middle of the day. He needed to be on the other side of the forest soon, if only to put some physical distance between himself and the site of his old life.

  The Menyanthes was larger than he remembered, and harder going. The day trips he’d never really enjoyed had taken well-known routes, trackways that he’d lost by now, despite still going in roughly the right direction. A dark, tumbling stream crossed his path as the trees thinned, churning cream as it babbled over a chain of water-smoothed, flesh-coloured boulders. He waded into it up to his waist, watching carefully for any sign of the stringy red eels that he’d heard liked to swim up the rectums of unfortunate travellers. Once safely on the far bank, Lycaste dismissed them as another of Impatiens’s exaggerations. What on earth would they be after up there? It was surely another rumour, nothing but Impatiens’s own inexhaustible fascination with that area.

  His stomach rumbled treacherously as his legs dripped, totally uninterested in Lycaste’s circumstances as it demanded a return to normal life, so he found a clearing by the running water to pick food. While he ate, he stared vacantly out between the widely spaced trees on the slope, composing his plans. Ahead a valley split the land like a crease on a rumpled blanket, fading to a blurred line of distant blue. That was where he’d start again, perhaps buy a house, some land, hire servants. How difficult could it be? He already knew what he’d do first, once he was settled in. The model palace wouldn’t be too difficult to rebuild; he’d make it larger, more impressive, with gardens and pipes for running water.

  Eventually he picked his way down the hill on already toughened soles, following the gurgling water until it cascaded sharply in a staggered tumble of falls to a dark plunge pool. Plenty of food grew around its edges, with wood for a fire and pebbles to shore it. The only downside of making camp there would be the noise of the water, so he trekked a little further, finding a copse of palms that offered some protection and enough silence to hear if anyone was coming.

  The pack had been packed swiftly by Elcholtzia while it was still dark, and Lycaste was touched at the startlingly unnecessary things the old man had thought to include. Lycaste began to wish he’d got to know him better, wondering if it was senility or genuine thoughtfulness that had led to the provision of a children’s book, a small bottle of spirits and a hammer in the same pocket. In the cloth compartment next to them sat his telescope, hurriedly retrieved from the scene of the crime—Elcholtzia had been pleased to see it was one of the few things Lycaste had thought to take with him. Whether through the blind coincidence of their respective ages or the situations into which they had been forced together, Elcholtzia had in the short space of the last few Quarters become something of a father figure to the younger man. No matter how much he still disliked him, Lycaste wished Elcholtzia were with him now on his journey. Not so much for the company—Lycaste didn’t think he’d ever really crave that—but something much baser, often denied him in his childhood. As he’d bidden the man farewell, Lycaste had wanted suddenly to embrace him, to share the unspoken regard he was sure they’d both developed for each other. The fact that such an impulse would have felt absurd only a few days before somehow strengthened it, and he caught himself hoping that one day, when he had atoned in whatever way he could for what he’d done, he would see Elcholtzia again.

  By the light of a small fire, lit with a box of phosphorettes, he opened the bag and looked at the book, flicking through its thin metal tablets. Lycaste didn’t try to read anything in order, instead dipping in here and there to look at the illustrations, finally gaz
ing into the fire until he was almost sure he was blind, the brilliant panorama of stars washing out when eventually he looked away. There were no voices in the Menyanthes at night, and if he was watched at all he didn’t sense it. He thought of his journey with the whisperers; that stunted figure in the woods hadn’t looked like a normal man, and it was only then that Lycaste realised he knew who it was: old Jotroffe. Lycaste admired him, even if he was quite the dullest person he had ever met. He remembered Elcholtzia welcoming the whisperers to his home and wondered if the two strange old men were friends.

  He tugged another branch onto the fire. So the ghost in the woods was real, and a real man was now a ghost. He peered into the darkness around him, imagining his own judgement already under way in whatever dark pockets of the world the dead might still confer. Perhaps Callistemon was there now, explaining his case to their own Plenipotentiaries, pleading that they punish the wretch who’d taken his life.

  In the night he dreamed of nothing, sobbing softly against his arm as he curled into a tight ball, his huge frame that of a little boy again.

  The next morning was supposed to be the first day of his new life, but it didn’t feel like that. Everything was the same: the light, the trees, the pool of water. And he was still a murderer.

  Lycaste sorted dejectedly through the food he would take with him on his next day’s walk, breakfasting only on sugary things. The cleansing saliva they’d inherited from generations of presumably having to clean one’s own teeth was lightly honeyed, especially strong on waking. Breakfast was sweet, whether you wanted it to be or not.

  “Give way to your opponent; thus will you gain the crown of victory,” he said aloud as he packed, startling himself. A scrap of verse memorised by heart, hammered into Lycaste’s brain by his soliloquizing father during a lesson in classics. Who wrote that? Arkimid? Well, he certainly hadn’t learned from it. Lycaste sighed as he packed. He’d thought that boorish man sophisticated once. Now he could see his father for what he was: a simpleton desperate for any scrap of so-called wisdom that came his way.