Force Majeure (8 page)

‘How would you know?’

‘Because I’ve met him.’

A part of her was telling her
sleep
. The pillow was dense and soft. It absorbed her head.

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘I met him when I was a boy.’

‘Even when you were a boy he would have been pushing 200.’

‘Have you thought I might be older than I look?’

‘No.’ Pause. ‘Go on then, what happened? What was he like?’

‘He spoke to me. He told me important things. I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘I don’t remember. I don’t remember his face or anything about him.’

‘He’s a big blank.’

‘But he was real. He held my hand. You remember someone’s touch even if you forget the rest.’ Pause – she thought he’d dropped off – then: ‘He was recruiting me. That was it.’

‘Go to sleep.’

‘Do you want to know why I keep coming to the old free house?’

‘Not tonight. Go to sleep.’

Sleep.

In Candida, Kay dreamed, in Candida (where dreams are true).

For the past week she had dreamt of Xan, every night. She knew him more intimately in her imagination than she did from their few minutes together in the cell. In dreams, he came to her like an old friend or a childhood memory. He took her to the high point of the city and paralysed her tenderly and stripped her tenderly and mounted her tenderly. There was no join between their bodies. Their skins, reflecting one another, met seamlessly, and her consciousness flickered from her to him and back again, until it was no longer possible to tell who was who.

She had never been in love before.
That
poison.

Xan lay gasping and red on the brickwork, steam rising from his body. ‘When I was at school,’ he said, ‘there was a girl who claimed she used to be a boy until a wizard kidnapped her, locked her in a tower and cut off her dick. As you do.’

Her mouth filled with laughter and phlegm; she had to cover her face.

‘We must have gone to the same school.’

And Esteban was watching them – no, watching her – and his face was haunted.

It stops being a dream about Xan and becomes a dream about Esteban, as he is now. This is, after all, her first night away from the old free house since she arrived in Candida, and her body adjusts to new surroundings. Kay has her head in his pillow, where his dreams and fantasies have soaked. She flits from the bed into his skin and watches herself through drowsy but unsleeping eyes. He has an unshiftable erection. She feels it as a hungry alien graft, a parasite in control of his entire body.

There is something of the hero in Captain Milo Esteban. He’s morbid and romantic. There is an attractive woman lying under his bedclothes and those sheets are an invisible country to be conquered. He fondly imagines the folds on the blankets, faint lines in the gloom, as a labyrinth that all champions must pass through to reach the centre, where the captive maiden is staked out as dragon-feed, where the treasure lies buried, where the minotaur lurks.

No.

No, she’s the real deal. She’s not a prize or a riddle to be solved, no, she’s not a virgin or a monster, no, she’s not territory to be seized and tamed. She’s complicated in flesh and spirit. She’s a human animal. His head is full of her, of the pheromone signature of her pores, of the memory of the curve of her breasts below her clothes, of the tiny movements of her hands and her head as she talks. He wants to know the taste of her mouth and her sweat and her inner thigh.

There’s water-pressure at the base of his stomach and alcohol fizzling away in his system. His bedroom, though cool, is stuffy, because they’ve used all the air in arguing. He goes to the bathroom to relieve himself, then returns to stand over her sleeping body while one hand rubs the back of his neck and the other cups his genitals through the line of his trousers. Embarrassment. That’s what he’s feeling. Embarrassment and self-loathing.

‘You found her then?’

He looks to his side, only mildly surprised. ‘Is this her?’

‘This is her,’ says his guest. Esteban paces to his desk and takes out
challanco
’s envelope, torn to expose padding. Grey wood pulp sheds like confetti on his floorboards. He hasn’t looked through it since he received it – two days after his defeat at the hand and the broomstick of Ernesto (spit!) de Broca, one day after his meeting with the dreadful chatelaine-witch of the old free house. The ghost of the stroppy little messenger-bird haunts him about her bike, and there are more Appeared, always more Appeared. Were there people left in the real world anymore?

He had, by this time, already forgotten Kay. He was full of lost love and hopeless lust.

At that precise moment, he was thinking: ‘I need a prostitute. A simple, common prostitute, selling herself on a street corner. Not a witch, just a whore; not a carnival, just a brothel; not the Mystery, just an uncomplicated shag. The Gestapo Twins always ambush me on the way in. They’re making fun of me. Frankly, they don’t get it up for me.’

He was sitting at his usual table at the Café Andelsprutz. He always left a spare chair in the hope that someone would join him. He was not at all surprised to find the man sitting opposite him, the same man he has in his room now, black-coated, black-hatted, otherwise vague as a poem written on water.

‘Captain Emilio Esteban?’ he asked.

‘This is me.’

The newcomer laughed, and the silence of the city strangled the noise. ‘Who is it that runs in the woods?’

Esteban scrambled from his chair, dropped to his knees and choked on the answer: ‘The fawn and the poet and the warrior of the old country.’

The next ritual question, insistent: ‘And what is the secret of Candida?’

‘This is the young land over the sea in the West.’

‘And who were the architects of the city?’

‘They removed themselves from all the histories, and we call them dragons.’

‘And who is it that sits upon the dragon throne? Whom does it serve?’

‘You, sir,’ Esteban said, his eyes fixed on a face he knew would slip away with the morning dew.

Doctor Arkadin popped his tongue. Disappointment. ‘You’re an idiot.’

Esteban felt dislocated, as though he hadn’t left his flat and was in fact kneeling by Kay’s sleeping body with his face pressed close into her heat. (But this is still some weeks in the future, and the realisation almost shakes him out of his dream, and Kay out of hers.)

‘Little wonder you’re all such dismal poets.’

‘I thought you wrote the officers’ oaths.’ An afterthought: ‘Sir.’

‘I went up to Cambridge in a sunless year and came down full of oaths and pledges. I’m only mortal. I was made by my mistakes. Captain, will ye follow me please?’

‘Where to, sir? And why?’

‘Does it occur to you that the officer corps of Candida lacks the discipline or the sense of duty you’d expect from a formal army?’

He shrugged. ‘Sometimes.’

‘Do you think this should be corrected?’

‘Now that you mention it –’

‘Ah, please follow me, Captain, because I asked politely. A great fear is upon me, a fear for the future of this city and what might be done to it.’ He turned to move away – and this was his one distinctive feature, the limp he’d acquired after driving a gangrenous nail through his foot on the boat from Ireland – but stopped and turned and raised a warning finger. ‘If you must address me, then call me
doctor
.’

‘And you can call me
idiot
, doctor.’

Then they were in the vaults, the great warren of tunnels and archives and shelters beneath the city that had been excavated for fear that the continental wars of the new century – now the past – would reach into the mountains. Esteban had been here before, of course, at least at the junctions where they intersected the lower storeys of the academy, but he still found them oppressive and claustrophobic. (Kay felt the knot tighten beside her breast, pain like cancer.) The only sounds were the lonely drip of distant water and the soft Dublinese from the doctor’s mouth. Their feet made no sound on the stone floor, not even the doctor’s drag-limp – he walked without a cane and refused Esteban’s offers of help. The vaults were whispering galleries.

‘Do you ever wonder what it’s like to ride a dragon?’

‘I can’t say that I believe in dragons, doctor.’

Despite the honour, or perhaps delusion, of Doctor Arkadin’s company, Esteban’s thoughts were still turned to sex. He imagined himself as a knight, slaying dragons to rescue grateful and willing virgins. The virgin and the dragon were the same. She embraced him with biting claws, her eyes were coal-red and her pores sweated gold.

Doctor Arkadin chuckled to himself. ‘There are no such thing as dragons. They don’t exist, and it’s their non-existence that gives them power over us. They ride us in our dreams and our accidents. The sleep of reason brings forth monsters. We – you and I – everyone in this city, even our enemies, are at the mercy of forces we can’t control, and our only consolation is the knowledge that those forces are tormented and bedevilled by monsters of their own. You
should
wonder. This is our door.’

There was no door, just the gap. For that moment, at least, Doctor Arkadin was a huge man; his bulk filled the jamb and hid the interior, but Esteban, squeezing after him, smelled cooled oil, soot and stale electricity. The doctor was an engineer, and this gap had the smell of an abandoned forge. Rag carpeted the floor and scuffed beneath his feet. On the workbench-altar, in its column of light, was the brass-headed god that Esteban had heard described but never seen before with his own eyes.

‘
Challanco
,’ he murmured, and Doctor Arkadin, by his silence, confirmed it.

It was three times the size of a normal human head. There were no lines or joins visible on its skin, but its eyes and toothless mouth were round, hollow sockets. It was antique and smeared with preserving grease, which had congealed into a caul half-wrapped over its bald dome. Esteban thought he caught the doctor’s own likeness in its silently howling features, but that might have been a trick of the half-light. Doctor Arkadin himself gazed at his creation, and traces of pride and revulsion and sorrow could be read from his face.

‘Does it speak?’ Esteban asked.

‘No. It doesn’t speak. You must remember it was built in an age when its purpose could not be fully described. Had I known of the Lady Lovelace and her machine-muse, I might perhaps have thought of it, but no. The idea of giving it a tongue or a voice was preposterous. What could it possibly say that we’d understand? It observes. It orders. It computes. I conceived it after the Oracle of Delphi, as my gift to the city. This and the officer corps and the grand designs.’

Esteban had assumed it was meant to be a man, but that no longer seemed clear.

Through layers behind Esteban’s eyes, Kay realised
challanco
was exactly how she’d imagined God when she was a child, before she was old enough to understand what that meant. God was bald and empty and terrifying. Even then, she hadn’t believed in Him.

She wore Esteban like a suit of ice. She wanted to move his fingers to touch
challanco
’s skin and find out if it was as chilly as she imagined, but he stayed locked in his dream and his hand hung warily at his side. ‘Did
challanco
summon me?’

Doctor Arkadin’s head tilted slowly from side to side. ‘It causes things to be moved and sorted. It has been assembling a dossier on the current crisis. You must take its findings and do with them as you see fit.’

‘Me? Just me?’

‘That’s up to you. I notice you seem unconcerned by the idea of crisis.’

‘Candida swallows threats. They are its meat and drink, so the witches say. It gobbled you up, doctor, if Flower-of-the-Lady is to be believed.’

The doctor’s eyes were glossy brown, the same shade as his brass creature. ‘Please reach into
challanco
’s mouth and remove what you find there. You may still decline.’

Esteban rolled up his sleeve and sank his arm into the head. He expected a soft, tight hollow with damp, fleshy-walls, but there was just rust and cool metal. His fingers touched the edge of the package. With a little difficulty, he pulled it free.

‘The problem is,’ Doctor Arkadin began. He broke off, suddenly uncertain, then resumed: ‘The problem is the officer corps. It attracts men and women with ambition and designs. Some of you still hope for the kind of power and order I once imagined. Some of you may have found allies outside the city who have their own reasons to encourage your folly. As an officer, you will have to infiltrate the conspiracy and turn it whatever way you see fit.’

Esteban was aware of Doctor Arkadin’s unsympathetic eyes measuring him. The doctor was a gambler, not certain of his captain’s honesty or his loyalty. Esteban stood uncomfortably still, trying to create an air of sincerity. He still held
challanco
’s sagging envelope; it was limp and unwieldy in his hands, and he let the awkwardness show, enough to help the impression.