The Promise of the Child

by Tom Toner

  Ghaldezuel snorted, perhaps at the obviousness of the statement. “My dear, innocent, Corphuso—as a scientist you make a dangerous assumption, assuming a constant that is no longer there.”

  “A constant?” He grasped the meaning only after he had spoken.

  “Yes. The Amaranthine. They are broken at last.”

  “They are at war with one another? I had not heard this …”

  Ghaldezuel shook his head, turning the cup over and placing it on the table. “They have crowned a new king. And this one pays whoever gets the job done fastest.”

  Message

  “They say he’s brought other Glorious Birds with him,” tweeted the little white and red messenger bird. “They say they are at least as beautiful.”

  Lycaste didn’t understand. “Why?”

  The creature twitched. “There will be such jealousy.”

  Lycaste looked sidelong at it, wondering if he’d ever get a straight answer from anything in the Utopia. The Glorious Bird hadn’t been seen in the garden for days, disappearing the same morning as the strange Amaranthine. Now the bird was returning to the fringes of the Utopia with a flock of his peers, Glorious Birds from other gardens around the Black Sea, and rumours were spreading. Mated pairs squabbled in the branches and around the lakes as the females preened to be wooed again, anxious that their plumage look as good even out of season.

  Lycaste thanked the bird and nibbled on some breakfast, his appetite disappearing. He stepped over a crushed egg pushed from a conjoined blister of nests in a tall tree.

  Their arrival was announced with growing volume, as if Lycaste’s ears were being slowly unplugged. The background whistles and screeches increased as each successive mile of trees spotted the thin, bright line gliding over the Utopia. He looked up, shading his eyes. They were flying in formation, perfectly straight and very high. He couldn’t see their colours. As they drew overhead, the foremost bird angled its wings and soared diagonally, looping beneath the others as they held their formation. It spiralled down until Lycaste recognised their Utopia’s Glorious. A group of riotously coloured peacocks arranged themselves to meet the Glorious Birds on a lawn not far from where Lycaste stood with some of the Amaranthine, their senile muttering suddenly excited.

  As he watched the display, a parakeet landed with a flutter on his shoulder, its talons puncturing his skin.

  “How goes it, Lycaste?”

  He stiffened, grimacing as the talons bit deeper, looking up into the creature’s gimlet eyes.

  “Who do you think they’ve come for?” it whispered.

  “What?” He flinched and tried to sweep it away, feeling blood run from the punctures. The parakeet dodged and skipped to his other shoulder, clacking its black beak in a laugh. “Thought you got away with it, didn’t you?”

  Lycaste grabbed at it, bending in an attempt to shake the bird free.

  “The Most Great and Glorious hears everything,” it cackled, hopping to the back of his neck. “We’ve had your sort trying to hide in here before. Killing-men, despoilers, rapists. This garden is closed to you now.”

  The line of Glorious Birds above them dispersed, each plummeting towards him as the parakeet finally flapped away. Lycaste watched them javelin over the trees, trying to absorb what was happening. They knew, somehow. He turned to run, the crowd of birds and Immortals parting before him.

  To Lycaste’s side, a bird swooped low under the branches, aiming for his head. He ducked, striking out as he felt the breeze of its wings. Talons scraped and dug into his back. He tripped, the arm that was meant to break his fall held by something above and behind, and landed on his face in the shit-smeared grass beneath the tree. The Glorious Birds fell and covered him, prodding and scratching.

  Lycaste heaved his shoulders and shook a screeching bird free, crushing its wing beneath his arm.

  “His eyes!” screamed the Glorious.

  A bird pounced on Lycaste’s head and pecked frantically at his brow. He shouted incoherently and rolled again, digging his face into the grass.

  “Stop!” he cried, his voice muffled. “Stop!”

  “Roll him,” said one of the birds. Lycaste turned himself, staying as limp as he could while trying to avert his face from their manic beaks.

  The Utopia’s own Glorious Bird landed weightily on his chest.

  “Men who kill men are found out. They cannot hide, not even in here. The noble family of Callistemon Pallidus Berenzargol, Second-Prince,” it said, looking around the lawn at the surrounding Amaranthine and birds, “expect you for trial.”

  There was only one nest large enough to serve as Lycaste’s cage, that belonging to the Glorious Bird himself. After some deliberation he was forced within. He shoved aside objects and cloth, snapping shelves and pulling down hanging things until he was half-comfortable in the fishy-smelling hovel, his weight sagging the branches that held the nest up and drooping it almost to the ground. One of the colourful birds pushed the shutters closed and he was alone again.

  Lycaste breathed in the odour and laid his head against the nest wall, his ear pressing painfully against a sharp piece of something woven into the structure. He began to cry, his convulsions jiggling the cage, part of him wondering how long it had been since he’d last wept. It was over, done. Imprisoned at last for some moment of thoughtlessness that he couldn’t yet identify. He would have to accept what was coming to him.

  He was awoken by a tapping on the shutter. It was perfectly dark, so dark that if he tried hard he could pretend he was confined to a full-sized room. A patch of grey appeared as the shutter opened.

  “Sotiris?” he whispered.

  The grey light chuckled. “Yes, yes. Sotiris is gone now. You are big and yet I am small.”

  He tried to remember Well-Spoken’s real name, the one Sotiris had used. “Garamond?”

  “Garamond,” the voice replied. “Sebastian Saul Garamond. The good ship S. S. Garamond.”

  “You remember your name?”

  “I am Sebastian. You are big, I am small. Here.” He passed Lycaste a little bundle of wrapped linen, his supper. Lycaste hadn’t realised how hungry he was until he saw it. He needed to piss, but somehow knew they wouldn’t let him out to do it.

  “And a message from Sotiris, yes,” added the Amaranthine.

  Lycaste paused, a berry in his mouth. “A message? From Sotiris?”

  “Sotiris says be patient, you will see.” Garamond chuckled again and closed the hatch.

  Lycaste waited in the darkness, food forgotten, but apparently that was it. He wasn’t sure what to make of it all. Was the message, brief as it was, something he could believe? He had been starting to consider, before Garamond’s arrival, the terrible notion that Sotiris himself might have betrayed him to the Utopia’s guardians. But that was impossible—why would he? Lycaste still knew nothing about the Immortal; a group of returning Amaranthine had interrupted their talk in the clearing and demanded that everyone dance. The next morning, Sotiris was gone.

  He nestled his head into the side of the basket, knees drawn up to his chin. Perhaps it was just a hiccup in Garamond’s mind, a replayed message meant for someone else centuries, even millennia ago. It meant nothing at all, really. He couldn’t allow it to give him hope, not yet.

  Song

  The peculiar man plunged and sank, opening his eyes after a few moments of darkness. Far below his slim white legs the sand was eerily clean, like unbroken desert dunes. Not a single fish or crab sifted the rippled floor. He had swum in the coves of the Tenth Province for hundreds of years, returning almost every Midsummer to the cool green of the Nostrum sea where serpents slithered in the depths. He treated it like a holiday from his long exile on the Old World, staying at the finest guest houses on his way through, walking the near-endless fruit forests and listening to their whispers as night fell, the stars around which his fellows still lived twinkling in the cobalt evening skies.

  The giant Southern Melius here were some of Jatropha’s favourites—he
knew them all by name, their daily lives, habits and desires. He loved them like his children, which, at a certain remove, he supposed they almost were. Of course they thought him odd, as prior generations had, but that was the price he had to pay. Jatropha liked to believe he had never been the self-conscious sort.

  So, he thought, diving deeper. The war for the Old World progressed. Elatine, commander of the Jalan legions, was victorious and his regime now prevailed in the west, challenging the First’s unbroken rule of these lands for the last six hundred years. Those who cared—and they were few—said First Lord Protector Zigadenus’s death was the most the Nostrum Melius could hope for, the greatest impetus to true change in the Provinces of the Old World. They said it wouldn’t be long before Elatine took the Second and—he presumed—the massacres and segregation and all the rest of it began at last in the name of revolution. Jatropha shook his head underwater, enjoying the languid sweep of his hair across his view, enclosing him. He’d known both of them, the Asiatic warlord Elatine and his high-born Firstling nemesis Zigadenus, and they had known him, albeit in subtle shades of disguise. The correct Melius had won, of that he had no doubt, but the reality was unjust. Zigadenus, blown to ash at the summit of a hill along with sixty-three mounted aristocracy, had always been the better of them: a wiser, kinder, more innately truthful creature than the ambitious Elatine. Zigadenus had been a friend.

  Whatever the characters of the Melius involved, Elatine’s forces were poised to mend the Provinces. Their legions stood for the time-honoured principles of distributed wealth and social equality—everything the First’s dominion had denied to all but the elite within its lands. The warlord’s personality, however disagreeable Jatropha might have found it when last they met, should matter no more than the grain of bread given to a starving man. It was the will of his armies and his home Provinces that propelled his advance, as well as a mysterious source of funds. Jatropha suspected there was Amaranthine coin—Firmamental Ducats—mixed in with the heaps of silk that filled Elatine’s vaults, and more than a few crates of Prism materiel, too. What was important, he had to keep reminding himself when his ancient thoughts turned sour, was that Elatine appeared to hate the decadence of the age enough to be uncorrupted by it, publicly demanding as his first law of succession an end to almost six and a half centuries of tyranny, and the osmosis of all that accumulated power back to the free Melius of the Nostrum Provinces. That was fair and right but—Jatropha knew—simplistic.

  The Firmament, glorious as its ancient masters wished to portray it, was in essence an impossibly delicate, eleven-light-year-wide ecosystem; an ecosystem reliant on very exact balances of power and influence to survive. The Amaranthine (though he rarely felt any connection with them any more, having not visited the precious Satrapies for many lifetimes) held sway only through the ratio of butlers, gardeners, housekeepers and paying tenants to the riff-raff that inhabited the thin wilderness—the Prism Investiture—that surrounded their huge and desolate estate, the twenty-three Solar Satrapies. If a world within the Firmament fell into disorder—as had befallen Epsilon India before the Volirian Conflict, if he remembered correctly—someone had to make sure it wasn’t swiftly colonised by undesirables like the Lacaille, the Vulgar, or any of the multitude of other savage primate races into which the fringes of humanity had twisted, some of which he’d been unfortunate enough to have had dealings with whenever they’d strayed onto the Old World. It was the Old World, this murky globe of forgotten, monstrous life, that would fall apart should any of them gain a foothold, a rotten front tooth in a ruined smile. Not many of the Immortals cared all that much any more. Most were consigned to the Utopias in a dribbling stupor or swaddled in their fortresses within the Vaulted Lands, only the sharp mountains and deep forests for company. These relatively populous, cosmopolitan centres of the Firmament were where such dangers were supposed to be considered and discussed, but by the sounds of things the Amaranthine had already slipped into a coma from which there would be no waking. There were simply too few sane Immortals now to hold their protectorates, too many slowing, uninterested minds.

  He rose a little in the water, watching mercurial light sliding under the surfaces of the waves; his ears keenly open to the thick sounds all around. Did it not make sense, then, to worry about who governed so much of a vital territory? To educate them, if one could, and warn them of powers that might wish to exploit them in the future? Elatine’s success in the Inner Provinces would result in the joining of two very different continents under one regime, their giant inhabitants sharing so little in common; the Jalan Melius: almost fifteen feet tall at the shoulder, enlightened but passionate, brimming with testosterone; and their European counterparts: smaller, wilier, viciously supercilious.

  But that was still to come, a hypochondriac’s box of night-time fears. Right now there was nothing to report at all, his sources in the First, Second and lately Third having fallen silent. The silence troubled him more than any news could.

  The Melius were a perceptive species with senses more attuned to the workings of the world than any other Prism (who were of course closer cousins to them than the Amaranthine, no matter what nonsense the First liked to propagate). They had long been sensible to the obscure motions of the Firmament beyond the sky, their history and culture filled with stories of peculiar creatures and flying galleons, magic that fell from the stars. They felt things even the Amaranthine could not feel, and as such Jatropha had listened earnestly to the generations of tales of a spirit that haunted the woods of the Westerly Provinces, a ghoul that took the form of a beast, sometimes a man, plump and vague and kindly in his appearance. On his many travels he had sought it out, intrigued by the origins of the enduring myth, but in the darkness of the forests he had felt nothing. Surely some as-yet-undocumented animal lived in the depths of those woods, something eerie enough to frighten the enormous Melius that had told him the tales, but he had not been able to find it.

  But now he had a particular hobby to indulge, and another animal to find.

  Jatropha extended an arm and swept it through the green gloom, meaning to swim deeper and investigate the dunes. There should be more fish about; at least two thousand individuals spiralling and flashing beneath his toes, but instead he counted only a dozen. A lionfish bristling with red barbs drifted amiably past, then changed its course and flitted away. He turned his head to watch it go. Something was coming.

  Jatropha cupped his ears and dropped lower into the abyss. Since sounds moved much faster in liquid, he’d often thought the world beneath the sea was a more solid, real place than the world above, where beings dwelt in almost nothing by comparison: thin clearings of gas used as spaces to call home. At first he kept losing it, but soon the whispered song grew loud enough for him to turn away and close his eyes. The thing sounded almost human, more than whales or dolphins ever could. He’d heard those mammals speaking as spring turned to summer, warning one another of a recently arrived danger. Jatropha had called out to them tentatively, remembering that dolphins tended to shyness when they learned that men could speak their words. After enough careful pleasantries had been exchanged, they’d told him more about the creature than any of the Melius knew, even that poor Drimys. Now he wanted to meet it himself.

  The Amaranthine took his hand away from his ear and opened his eyes. It was close now. Despite everything Jatropha knew, he was scared. It was coming for him, having undoubtedly felt his heartbeat before he’d heard a thing. But he still couldn’t see it.

  He began to mouth his own construction of the song, keeping it low at first while he practised, feeling only the vibrations in his throat. He spoke louder into the brine, having already had a few weeks’ practice. The sounds around him stopped immediately. The Immortal waited, turning like a hanging body in the breeze. A child’s body. At least that would end, unless they’d all been very wrong.

  The huge face loomed to his right, appearing in the dappled shafts of light like a full moon through clouds, the opposite di
rection from where the songs had been coming. Tried to trick me.

  It appeared to smile as it watched the Amaranthine, though he knew it couldn’t, that it didn’t know how. An accidental development producing meaning from the set of a predator’s jaw. He floated, looking at it properly for the first time.

  It was easy to see how some might guess the creature was related to white sharks, now reduced and rare in these waters, but this close it really didn’t look much like them at all. Jatropha studied the lines of its ghostly body, the angles of its many fins—a greater number than any class of mackerel shark possessed—thinking the massive creature bore more of a resemblance to a huge, primordial sunfish than anything else. It waited, a white circle watching him in the empty green ocean.

  The Immortal sang to it again, and this time the fish replied.

  PART IV

  Colour Blend

  A bristle came loose from her brush as she ran it over the swab of blue, lodging just beneath a dry patch of white that she planned later to turn into the implication of a cloud. There weren’t any clouds today, of course, but it would give the landscape some drama.

  The bristle drooped in the thick blue and settled, some liquid collecting over it in a line of darker ultramarine. She looked at the hair critically, her hand poised, ready to flick it away with a nail. No, she would leave it, scrunching her eyes and twitching her head this way and that to see what others might see. The minute imperfection would give the future cloud an extra dab of accidental weight. She wouldn’t tell her friends that, just to keep up the mystique. Half of each painting was finished by luck.

  Pentas dipped the brush quickly in water as she glanced back at Impatiens, basking in the sun, and dropped it on the table next to Briza so that he might use it if he wanted to. She selected something small, wide and rectangular to block in his sagging, sleeping form, studying the brush for loose ends. She’d have to get some new materials from Sonerila; the birds had bought some beautiful things during their last outing to Mersin. Her watercolour set had come with her from the Seventh, containing blocks of mineral that never appeared to run low.