The Promise of the Child (19 page)

“A company of Players?” Impatiens exclaimed. “You must mean Moringa's?”

“That's right. Charming, all of them. I offered funds to pay for my journey but they wouldn't take a thing.”

“Doesn't sound like Moringa to me.”

Lycaste didn't like this toadying. He thought it might be time to retire soon. He was just wondering how he could best get them all out of his house while subtly suggesting to Pentas that she could stay when the tinkle of the dinner bell sounded from the formal dining room next door. He sighed inwardly, realising he had at least a Quarter more of politeness ahead of him.

*

The sun shone its last as Lycaste sat in the window of his topmost room, a voltaic orange disc dipping below the gilded outline of the rocks. It was at its clearest at this time of day, a lamp left on in the next world. He looked down into the orchard, alive with animal calls and chanting flowers. Pink light drenched the vibrant greens, electrifying the trees, deepening the shadows dividing their branches. A creeping chill turned his head to the east. On the far side of the sky the green moon had risen silently, a crenulated, faded mint in the blue.

It was bearable in some company to be treated like a child—it even had its advantages—pressure to perform among guests was loosened and, eventually, removed altogether. It had taken his father years to expect so little of Lycaste, but when the moment finally came it was as if a great freedom had been awarded to them both, easing their relationship while it deteriorated so that its evaporation was entirely painless on the quiet afternoon when he left Kipris for good. He could feel it happening now in the presence of someone new, someone everyone thought they ought to impress.

He stepped away from the window to the lone table. Among the models and ring books that cluttered its surface was a thin tube. He picked the telescope up and weighed it in his hands before lifting it experimentally to his eye. At first the view was dark and he put it down, thinking perhaps it had all been some game of Elcholtzia's to see if Lycaste really would try it out. But of course it was dark—the cap was on. He removed it and swung the device around to see the hills, but was again met with nothing but a colourless smudge. Exasperated, he looked up at the moon, which sprang upon him in shocking, vivid detail. Lycaste gasped as he stared, mouth open.

Telescopes weren't rare—he'd been made to stare into them occasionally during his schooling years, but all the moon had yielded was a fuzzy green blob, not much clearer than when you looked at it with your own eyes. This was different. He smiled as he took in the dense, milky soup of cloud, wondering why Elcholtzia had chosen to lend him such a fine and undoubtedly expensive thing. Scanning the distant world, he could see no sign of anything man-made, reflecting after a while that not even a miraculous thing like this would see through cloud. The people up there were said to be long-dead, anyway, ancient prisoners consigned to the forests of the Greenmoon for terrible crimes.

His smile withered. The toy was a pleasant but ineffectual distraction from the day's events, and he looked briefly back at the chamber door, against which he'd pushed the table. Dinner had been an unbearably long-winded event, with speeches and toasts as the evening dragged on. After his eventual escape, he'd come up here, spying Impatiens taking their new guest home with him across the beach, Eranthis and Pentas following closely behind.

Lycaste put the telescope on the ledge, where it was rolled lazily by a breeze from the darkening sea. It wasn't that Callistemon was unpleasant, or even impolite—the Plenipotentiary had thanked Lycaste profusely after the meal, apologising for the abrupt manner of his arrival and the imposition of serving so many with such little notice—but Lycaste still didn't like the man. His speech was sometimes hard to follow, large words pouring out of him as if he were being paid by the syllable, and his face was even harder to read than most. Lycaste, of course, found it difficult to trust even the friendliest of newcomers so decided not to pay his doubts any heed. He was tired, overwhelmed by so many gatherings and events, tragedies and dramas. A week of not answering the door to anyone was what he needed, and some proper time to finish his palace in peace.

High Second

Impatiens's garden was smaller than his own, wild and unkempt, littered with Briza's toys. It contained fewer fruit trees, though the plants and bushes that did grow were more than enough to feed everyone who lived there with plenty to spare. He knew of nobody in the Province who went without; starvation, drought and blight simply did not exist—they had few terms for such phenomena save for negative spaces still lingering in their vocabulary, the opposite of what they'd always known. Illness was a more visible extreme, though confined at nearly all times to animals, even the speaking ones—the Cursed People. Sonerila and the birds were no exception, having lost their eldest brother to something too horrible for Lycaste to describe. He'd buried Mertensia during his fourth year at the house, unable to give them any real reason for the bird's death but simple bad luck and a poor constitution.

Lycaste trod carefully through the garden to Impatiens's side. He had to look where he walked for Briza's multicoloured toys hid submerged everywhere in the wild grass, adding even more colour to the garden. Small wooden men and animals, brightly painted or dyed, peeped from the foliage like dwarfish explorers pushing through a dense jungle. Lying in wait for them were mythical monsters made from metal and plastic, though the plastic creatures were rare and usually gathered up at the end of each day. Very few trees produced the stuff; they could be cultivated, of course, but there seemed little point unless it was to be traded. More common were the metals that gave some forests further inland a shimmer that could be seen from Elcholtzia's top room. The tin, iron and silver that fell from those trees was almost worthless, there being no industry in the region to require it, and littered the jungle floor until collected by anyone who did not yet possess a complete set of cutlery. The metal, alchemically seeded by long-ago peoples to multiply in the rock, was initially soft enough to mould and carve in a person's hand, with only a dip in salt water necessary to begin the hardening process. Every few miles along the coastline towards Mersin there glinted heaped stalagmites of silver as tall as the caves, where sporadic growths of metal trees had met the sea and shed their fruit over the years to harden at the water's edge.

“Is he ready?” asked Lycaste, glancing over Impatiens's shoulder at the house, a similarly sprawling dome punctured by three eggshell-blue towers vaguely similar in design to his own. He was already beginning to wish he hadn't agreed to come along. He could see no reason why he was even needed at all—Impatiens and Eranthis knew more about the Province and were on much better terms with many of the people living in it than he was. He watched Callistemon appear from the middle tower, his body coloured the same jaundiced yellow, striding quickly down the gentle hummock to meet them.

“It appears so,” said Impatiens, waving. He was silent for a moment. “You see that shade of yellow? That's his own. I told him he could make himself comfortable at breakfast and dispense with colours—but he never had any on.”

Lycaste didn't know which he found harder to believe, that the people of the Second were all such a ghastly colour or that the Plenipotentiary had arrived naked at his house.

“Rather grand of him, to decide not to wear a colour, don't you think?”

“Perhaps they don't bother with it,” said Impatiens. “I was too embarrassed to ask.”

“I wonder what other strange things he does?”

“I do remember he was
very
reluctant for me to carry his bag up to his room for him,” Impatiens replied. “Gracious to a fault—wouldn't let me lift a finger.”

It was still early in the second Quarter as they set off up the hill, fresh before the heat of the encroaching day. Only Eranthis accompanied the three men, promising that Pentas would join them later in the evening when the worst of the heat wore off.

“She doesn't cope well in these temperatures?” asked Callistemon as they reached the top of the first rise, wiping sweat from his forehead with a dainty monogrammed napkin. “I sympathise.”

“It's easy to burn out here at midday,” said Eranthis, who had coloured herself a bright gold, presumably for the occasion. “You should wear a colour, something dark.”

He looked at her. “It is a shame you cover yours—it's a beautiful blend.”

Eranthis smiled and returned her attention to the grass, walking a while longer without saying anything.

“Perhaps I shall pay you another visit soon, Lycaste,” Callistemon said, turning to him.

Lycaste, who had been thinking hard on the possibility that he had just witnessed the two of them flirting, of all things, looked up guiltily.

“Oh? I'm afraid I won't be of much interest.”

“Nonsense,” said the man as they reached the dirt road at the rise. “You contrive to be quite the most mysterious person I've encountered since I passed through the Fifth.”

Lycaste looked at the others in confusion. “Really?”

Callistemon smiled. “Well, besides this Jotroffe fellow.” He pointed accusingly at Impatiens. “Who I'm still determined to meet, Impatiens, so don't forget.”

They crossed the road, rather needlessly looking both ways, and continued on the narrower path that led north-east towards the thick brown and green haze of the jungle.

“This road will take me to the edge of the Province?” the Plenipotentiary asked, apparently addressing all of them.

“Yes,” said Impatiens at his side, “but you can't walk it. There's a donkey train that leaves from here every eight days.”

“So you're stuck with me until then?” He grinned, glancing down the road. “So, who are we visiting first, Impatiens?”

“That would be my friend Elcholtzia; he lives at the end of this track. He's the oldest of us in the Tenth.”

Callistemon turned and looked back to the view of the sea. “How old would that be?”

Impatiens smiled. “I'm not sure even he can remember. On his last birthday we decided he was one hundred and eighty-nine, but the preservation of his vanity might figure in that somewhere.”

Callistemon shrugged. “Not so old—in the Sixth I met a lady of two hundred and fifty who was about to wed for the third time. Her groom was only ninety-four. Can you imagine it?”

Lycaste wondered again at Callistemon's own age as the other two made appreciative noises at his side, but thought his standing with the man still too fragile to ask. He took his chance to look at the Plenipotentiary more frequently, snatching glances as they walked, and guessed that their visitor might only be in his early thirties, if that.

People grew slowly, mentally as well as physically—twenty years could pass without noticeable change—but there were signs. Callistemon bore the depth of line beneath his eyes to suggest he was approaching his first century, but was betrayed by a braying, immature laugh and a set of twelve notably short fingers. Since one's fingers stopped growing at around fifty-five, Lycaste could only assume the man was younger than him. His own hands still ached some mornings after a night of stretching, knitting bones, and he'd be glad in a year or two to see the end of it.

He looked up from his fingers to see that they were passing the borders of Elcholtzia's plantation. The western garden gate and the roof of his house were just visible above some tall sunflowers that nodded in the coastal breeze. At the land's northern edge, the deep, dry jungle began, aromatic in the growing heat.

“It's an odd house, I must say,” commented the Plenipotentiary, taking in the garden. “Does he live alone?”

“Yes. Well, there was another, but he left.”

Callistemon twisted to look at Impatiens, intrigued. “Another
man
?”

“That's right.”

The Plenipotentiary smiled and shook his head, as if bemused.

“I see.”

They discovered Elcholtzia among his flowers at the eastern gate of the walled garden. The old man was spreading compost with a heavy-looking iron garden fork, singing softly to himself. Impatiens went to him, taking the fork just as it looked as if Elcholtzia would lose his balance under the weight of the compost on the end of it, and pointed over to the visiting Plenipotentiary. Callistemon waved, standing with Lycaste and Eranthis at the edge of the garden, examining the bizarre house behind rather than the old man.

“Good morning,” said Callistemon, noticing just as they all did the clear contempt in the old man's eyes. The Plenipotentiary paused.

Elcholtzia met Lycaste's gaze, something in his expression deeper and darker than anything Lycaste had noticed in the man before. He turned his head to one side and spat. Lycaste recoiled inwardly, astonished and a little frightened at such rudeness. Callistemon looked on in wonder, perhaps never having been treated in such a manner.

Without a word, Elcholtzia planted the fork in the ground and turned back to the house, slamming the gate behind him.

Impatiens and Eranthis exchanged uncertain glances.

“Ez?” Impatiens called after him, but the old man had already disappeared inside.

Lycaste looked to Callistemon, who was staring with perplexed amusement at the garden fork still wobbling in the earth, his mouth slack. Lycaste saw that the insides of his lips were paler in colour. His skin flushed a darker shade of yellow, mixing to blend across his features quickly. He muttered something glottal under his breath. It sounded a little like High Second to Lycaste, who'd been forced to learn snippets of the fantastically difficult speech, the elaborate cousin of the First's ruling language, as a boy.

“
Well then,” Callistemon stammered, composing himself and nodding to Impatiens. “On to the next one I suppose. I think I'd like to take the aspect from the top of the hill, perhaps look at the coastline.” He turned to Eranthis, still at his side. “Shall we?”