The Promise of the Child

by Tom Toner

  Talk at the table was mostly gossip about their friends and neighbours within the walls of the citadel and any local politics that might stray close enough to matter, though the greater Troubles outside the Province cropped up whenever Eremurus had drunk more than a cup or two of wine. He didn’t share the Patriarch’s optimism that the troubles would spare them and their extended families, nor that it would fizzle out before getting anywhere near the Inner Provinces, citing examples of the past and the strength of support for the opposition abroad. He scoffed at rumours mentioned by Silene of unusual people on the smaller roads and sightings of machines and spies, claiming them too babyish to discuss in company, but nevertheless dissected anything new she’d heard each mealtime with obvious interest. To Lycaste, such grand talk of politics and war sounded like little more than high-minded paranoia, a way of grumbling about the world without being thought petty and childish. The state of affairs, whatever they might really be, affected him only in the citadel’s new tendency to bolt all of its gates at night and post hired guards on the ramparts—precautions which, even if he managed to leave the house at night, kept him totally imprisoned until he could devise a better escape.

  The family attended a banquet with Patriarch Hamamelis once a week, though Lycaste had no intention of staying long enough to be invited. He hardly said a word unless asked a direct question, and even then avoided giving anything but the minimum of information, never elaborating beyond his own story of waiting patiently for his master. The news greatly concerned Eremurus, who had rubbed his smooth double chins and announced that it was very grave indeed, the idea of a Plenipotentiary being in possible danger on the road. He’d suggested forming a search party, offering to leave the very next morning and spread down the Artery to the Fourth. Jasione shook her head after a moment’s thought, catching Lycaste’s eye with a painted flash, saying that a search would only embarrass the Plenipotentiary, who should be left to find his own way out. Lycaste had swallowed with difficulty and agreed.

  Silene avoided speaking to Lycaste directly, engaging her mother and father in conversation but stealing stealthy glances at him while she spoke. She was a precocious, outspoken girl, commanding the conversation at every opportunity. Lycaste disliked her enormously. He managed to see her only when they were supposed to eat together, even though their chambers were on the same floor. Regardless, he was forced to hear her at night, singing, humming and—once—doing something different entirely. Ulmus was not allowed to stay over, and Lycaste had to assume that whatever she was doing, she was doing it alone.

  The family coloured only at the table, Silene—apparently without irony—often choosing a clean, pure white. Keeping the exact blend of yellow in tight reserve beneath his own skin required concentration since it dissipated overnight and needed to be remembered anew each morning. The girl was sharp, like her mother, and Lycaste felt her eyes inspecting him closely for any alteration in tone whenever they met.

  Silene and Lycaste were finally forced together on the morning of the Patriarch’s banquet, when Silene asked him begrudgingly as she stood in the sun-warmed hallway if she could bring him anything before they left, obviously a chore her mother had given her. Lycaste hadn’t been invited and was glad of it. He thanked her but said there was nothing he needed, taking her hand quickly before she could withdraw and pushing a ribbon of silk into her palm. She looked at him with a startled gratitude, smiling shyly and dashing out of the door. He wasn’t sure why he’d done it, really, but the power of money was new to him; he liked the way people changed whenever a length of it appeared in his hand and had begun to hope that his eventual escape would become a lot easier if she was even fractionally on his side.

  That day was the only time he had the house to himself, so he used it to investigate the place as best he could, thinking there might be more to know before he went disappearing blindly off to foreign lands. There appeared no other immediate danger in their quiet, ramshackle house, the awful curried smell of cooked stuff all that ruined the pleasant surroundings. They were themselves clearly well off, perhaps in the employ of this Patriarch or whoever he was, and weren’t at all concerned with leaving a wealthy man to his own devices in their home. This unearned trust appeared to be yet another unexpected benefit of having money. Lycaste fancied he could get quite used to it.

  The helpers went with them and they had no pets to worry about, and so he was secure in the knowledge that he could go anywhere in the house without being watched. That word Silene had used, Cherry—it troubled him as he stalked about, investigating its rooms and cupboards, making sure he didn’t move a single object or book from its place. He sifted through the indexes of obscure metal ring books belonging to Eremurus, examined the girl’s toys and drawings of animals and yellow people, but he couldn’t find the word or anything like it mentioned anywhere. Investigating the last remaining chamber, where Eremurus and Jasione slept, was especially difficult. Lycaste found himself tiptoeing despite the emptiness of the place, worried that his feet would leave marks on the boards or that he’d forget something crucial when placing ornaments in their old positions. The cool silence of the place appeared to judge him, marking with disdain every jug he lifted and peered into, every print and handwritten letter he examined. He backed out of the chamber, examining the layout critically with narrowed eyes, a painterly technique he’d learned from Pentas. For a moment, the thought of her quickened his pulse, an echo of a feeling. He closed the door softly behind him as he left.

  The family returned when they said they would, discovering nothing amiss in their turned-over house. He’d waited in the dining room, hearing their creaking footsteps on the upper floors, watching the bowed beams above as he listened to determine which room each person was in, waiting for his intrusions to be discovered.

  Jasione came down holding something wrapped in a cloth. “Here,” she said, handing it to him, “you’re looking too thin, Onosma. From Hamamelis.”

  Lycaste took the parcel uncertainly. “From the man himself?”

  “From his table, at least.” She smiled. “It’s cold. I know you don’t really like warm food.”

  “No, I—”

  She waved her hand impatiently. “Take it, please.”

  He opened the cloth and looked inside. Raw fruits in small bundles. Jasione looked at him a little longer. “Good night, then, Onosma.”

  “Good night,” Lycaste replied, nodding for some reason, as if they’d just struck a deal.

  The morning following his search of the house, Lycaste came down to find Silene in lessons. A few of the copper books he had seen lying around her room now lay on the table, their rings open at what looked like anatomy, a complex drawing of tubes and pipes and bloated organs.

  He looked again. The organs were moving, pulsating, on the metal page. He went over, turning some pages unselfconsciously and watching body systems pump animated blood around the metal plate.

  Silene watched him coolly. “Those are the hypogastric arteries.”

  He looked up sharply, turning back to the original page. Silene gave him one last puzzled glance and went back to her reading as Jasione entered the room.

  “Did you enjoy the package?” she whispered.

  “Very much, thank you.” He indicated the open book. “Do you have a lot of these, the moving ones?”

  “The books? They all move.” She went and picked one up, opening it at random. An illustrated scene of men arguing passionately spilled out, though there was no sound. Words flowed out of their mouths and across the page.

  “May I have a look at them?”

  “Go ahead.” She passed him several and he took them to a seat by the window, positioning himself so that the sunlight didn’t hit the pages. Lycaste looked at the titles: An Unabridged History of the Seventh Tropical Point; Azolla Japonica; The Foolish Prince. He opened the Unabridged History and thumbed through several classical battles. He could feel the drawings moving beneath his fingers, some matt substance shifting on top of the
metal. When he pushed against it, a piece of the painted image would fall behind and stream around his finger like sluggish liquid, parting and collecting in a dazzling vortex of screaming faces.

  “Don’t do that,” said Silene, peering at him askance. “You’ll damage it.”

  “Sorry.” He took his finger away and the scene pooled back into place, revealing a small, armoured man astride a tiger, of all things.

  Lycaste turned the pages. More battles between men in clothes that flicked through fashions and colours like he could change his skin: executions, skin peeled from living faces, silent pain. Lycaste turned back to a face so he could study it more closely. It was like nothing he’d ever seen, so coarse and animal.

  “How old are these, Jasione?”

  “I bought most of them for my son about thirty years ago. When he died, Silene got them. Why?”

  He looked at her from across the room. Jasione smiled sadly back.

  “How do the drawings show things that happened such a long time ago?” Lycaste heard the simpleton in his voice as Silene rolled her eyes.

  “They’re printed. You can copy a print as many times as you like. The original image could be as old as the hills.”

  “Printed?”

  Jasione came over to him and opened a page in Azolla Japonica. An engraved couple walked hand in hand on the deck of some kind of barge. “Look.” She pressed the metal page against the back of The Foolish Prince and waited a few seconds. The cloned people came away perfectly and un-mirrored, already moving.

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Do you know these histories?”

  He’d never heard any of it. “Partly. Who was the foolish prince?”

  “You don’t know very much for an equerry,” muttered Silene somewhere behind him.

  Jasione glanced at her but said nothing, turning back to the window and looking out at the garden. Lycaste studied the side of her face while she thought, beginning to admire the strength of her profile more than a little as he thought of her loss.

  “He once ruled the whole world, or so the legend goes.” She saw Eremurus and waved. “As long as he lived there was peace, and he could have lived for ever, if he’d wanted to.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He fell in love and stopped caring about anything else. So someone else took up his duties and the world fell to ruin.” She peered into the blooming garden to judge the Quarter. It would soon be time to eat. “They say he still lives, somewhere out in the world.” Silene watched their exchange with doleful interest, rattling shut her ring books. She waited for Lycaste to hand her the last one and left the room without a word.

  Over the next two or three days, Lycaste learned the rough history of the Provinces, sneaking books to bed with him at night and reading on his window ledge, a tiny candle for company. First had always been easier for him to read than speak, and he understood more than enough to be able to navigate the indexes whenever an unknown name or place appeared without warning.

  He discovered a life he never knew existed, a life that would have remained invisible to him had he spun out his years by the sea. In a heavy and exceedingly boring-looking tome that he hadn’t planned to read entitled Geopolitical Landscapes of the Middle Anthropocene, he found yet more. He found himself.

  Paranthropus Melius. The Cherry. A race of bandits and thieves. Huge in stature and features, their culture simple and inherited, without any possibility of recovery.

  In a map he found swathes of the Southern Provinces were dyed crimson, the blocks of colour leaching this way and that to show the distribution of his species over recent centuries. There were diagrams of anatomical differences, historical essays on the formation of a cultural divide. Helpfully included were illustrations of standard men in comparison, fine and upstanding specimens of the First ruling elite: Homo Excultus. Overbred to resemble girlish children, they made even Cal-listemon look like a lumpen country mule.

  Lycaste flicked between histories and disagreements like a scholar of the age until he found the policies that had created such a carnival of monsters in the first place: sweeping reforms on a scattered population, something called Neonationalism and the glorification of one Province over all others, revolutions and dramatic coups. Attempts had been made every century for a thousand years at a well-worn word—Standardisation. Multiple-ethnicity was described as a flame that needed to be stamped out before it could spring up again. Provinces had merged, disbanded and fought all under one government, with legendary heroes either loved or reviled depending on the author of each volume.

  It took four or five mentions of the same person’s name for Lycaste to realise that his beautiful orchards by the sea had never really been his at all. He owned them about as much as a fish owned a reef. There was—or had been thirty years ago when Jasione acquired the book—a sovereign of the whole world. Lyonothamnus I. Lycaste looked at the picture beside the name, realising he’d seen it before. A reproduction of the same portrait hung not three feet away on the wall. Alongside it was a newer painting, the varnish that coated its surface still fresh and undamaged by the sun that streamed in each day. He squinted at it, seeing the familial resemblance. Lyonothamnus II. The new sovereign, their king, was just a boy.

  “Do you remember the thunderstorm a while back?”

  “Yes.”

  “I never saw one like that before.”

  He walked with Jasione in the garden, occasionally pulling things from trees whenever she pointed, but hardly listening.

  “I’d forgotten what rain was like. I hadn’t felt it in years and years.” She sighed. “We need one or two of those.” Jasione shook a branch and Lycaste reached to pluck the veined bulbs. He shouldered his basket again and scanned the crumbling garden wall, where a few hornets drifted in an afternoon daze.

  “There’s a hive in the wall somewhere,” she said. “Eremurus says they’re collecting food for their queen and her babies.”

  Lycaste remained silent. He didn’t look at her. He was thinking about something he’d read, squirrelled away in the epilogue of a fat history book. Everything was different now, seen through new eyes. A side effect of his new-found knowledge was an almost total evaporation of guilt for what he’d done to Callistemon, an unexpected, bittersweet absolution after all his time in the wilderness. It was enough to set his mind onto thoughts of home and possibly returning to whatever consequences awaited him.

  “I don’t like them, though—they eat our bees,” she said as they approached the nest somewhere in the old bricks.

  “Why don’t you do something about them, then?” Lycaste snapped.

  Jasione fiddled with the tie on her sun hat, unused to his tone. “They’ve always been here. I suppose …” They locked eyes. “I suppose it’s how the world works.”

  *

  The food was cooked not by fire, as Lycaste would have expected, but steamed in a huge oven that could have swallowed three men whole. Why a small family like theirs needed such a thing was beyond him. Across its gaping mouth hung spits at varying heights, on which Silene and Lycaste threaded the food picked that day from the garden. The chamber was always a murk of steam and water, which hung in droplets from their hands as they worked. Lycaste was not hungry, having secretly taken as much as he could before bringing in the produce, but still felt a regret at the ruin of fine food. He hadn’t wanted to help with the cooking that afternoon, wishing instead to be alone in his room, but it had been Jasione’s request.

  “Have you ever tried these raw?” he asked Silene after a particularly long silence, dangling an orange berry. It was changing him, living with them, but he wasn’t sure if he liked the change. Exile had forced Lycaste to grow up, his shyness blunted on all the unforgiving surfaces it had encountered. He’d started to care less about things, particularly after everything he’d read and seen since coming here.

  Silene eyed the fruit sceptically and took one. They were called Winterbottom’s pears where he came from. She chewed it and grimaced
, but not unkindly. “They’re too crunchy. You prefer them like that?”

  He nodded, taking a few. She smirked and reached past him to select a tough red fruit, brushing his sweating neck with her wet shoulder. “What about these?”

  “Just as good.”

  “Eat one in front of me and I’ll believe you.”

  He picked a fruit up by its stalk but Silene shook her head, pushing the one she held gently towards his mouth.

  “Why do you sit with us in lessons?” she asked quietly, stroking the fruit against his mouth clumsily so that the stalk scratched his cheek. “You’re grown already, you don’t need to learn any more.”

  Her rosy eyes were predatory. He knew then that the gifts of money had been a mistake. He’d given too much, too fast.

  Something woke Lycaste that night, the lights in his room glowing around him. Without twisting to look up he knew it was her, a silent presence considering him and his uncoloured body. He turned reluctantly, seeing her push the room’s single chair against the door. They watched each other, her eyes moving over his red nakedness with a revolted fascination.

  Tears welled in her eyes. Lycaste sat up, hunched, clutching his elbows. A thought occurred to him and he and pulled a knotted bunch of ribbons from his pack, counting them quickly. He went slowly to her and placed them in her trembling hand. She sniffed loudly, glancing at the ribbons.

  “You’re a sneak,” she said tearfully. “You lied to us.” She shook her head emphatically, shuffling back as he came closer. “You’re not a man. You’re a liar!”

  “I am a man!” he hissed, pressing more money into her hand and finally pulling her to him as she wept, hating the sound and smell of her.

  “Liar!”

  “I’ll leave tonight, I promise. Look—look how much you have.”

  She snorted and swallowed, wiping her eyes. “You didn’t give me anything.”

  “What?”

  “I never saw any money,” she sneered. “You’d better hand it over, though.”