‘I’ve found Shadwell,’ he announced, beckoning Cal over.
‘Where?’
‘At the Narrow Bright.’
Cal peered through the window adjacent to de Bono.
‘Not that one.’ he was told. ‘This one brings it nearer.’
A telescopic window; and through it, a scene to make his pulse pick up its pace. Its backcloth: the seething Mantle cloud; its subject: massacre.
‘He’s going to breach the Gyre,’ de Bono said.
It clearly wasn’t just the conflict that had paled the youth; it was the thought of that act.
‘Why would he want to do that?’
‘He’s a Cuckoo isn’t he?’ came the reply. ‘What more reason does he need?’
‘Then we have to stop him,’ Cal said, ungluing his gaze from the window and heading back towards the stairs.
‘The battle’s already lost,’ de Bono replied.
‘I’m not going to stand and watch him occupy every damn inch of the Fugue. I’ll go in after him, if that’s what it takes.’
De Bono looked at Cal, a mixture of anger and despair on his face.
‘You can’t.’ he said. ‘The Gyre’s forbidden territory, even to us. There are mysteries in there even Kind aren’t allowed to set eyes on.’
‘Shadwell’s going in.’
‘Exactly,’ said de Bono. ‘Shadwell’s going in. And you know what’ll happen? The Gyre will revolt. It’ll destroy itself.’
‘My God …’
‘And if it does, the Fugue comes apart at the seams.’
‘Then we stop him or we die.’
‘Why do Cuckoos always reduce everything to such simple choices?’
‘I don’t know. You’ve got me there. But while you’re thinking about it, here’s another one: are you coming or staying?’
‘Damn you, Mooney.”
‘You’re coming then?
XIV
THE NARROW BRIGHT
1
here were less than a dozen individuals from amongst Yolande’s rebel band who were firm enough of limb to make their way towards the Gyre. Suzanna went with them – Nimrod had requested that – though she told him in plain terms that any dream of overwhelming the enemy by force of arms was misbegotten. The enemy were many; they were few. The only hope remaining lay in her getting close to Shadwell, and dispatching him personally. If Nimrod’s people could clear her route to the Prophet they might yet do service; otherwise, she advised them to preserve themselves, in the hope that there’d be a life worth living tomorrow.
They got within about two hundred yards of the battle, the sound of shots, and shouts, and car-engines, deafeningly loud, when she had her first sight of Shadwell. He’d found himself a mount – a vast, vile monster that could only be one of the Magdalene’s children grown to a foul adulthood – and he was sitting astride its shoulders, surveying the battle.
‘He’s protected,’ said Nimrod at her side. There were beasts, human and less than human, circling the Prophet. ‘We’ll divert them as best we can.’
There’d been a moment, as they’d approached the Gyre, when Suzanna’s spirits had risen, despite the circumstance. Or perhaps because of it; because this confrontation promised to be the end-game – the war that would end all wars – after which she’d have no more nights dreaming of loss. But the moment had passed quickly. Now all she felt – peering through the smoke at her enemy – was despondency.
It grew with every yard they covered. Wherever she looked, there were sights pitiful or nauseating. The struggle, it was clear, was already lost. The Gyre’s defendants had been outnumbered and outarmed. Most had been laid low; the corpses food for Shadwell’s creatures. The remnants, brave as they were, could not keep the Salesman from his prize any longer.
I was a dragon once, she found herself thinking, as she fixed her eye on the Prophet. If she could only remember how it had felt she might be one again. But this time there’d be no hesitation, no moment of doubt. This time, she’d devour.
2
The route to the Gyre took Cal through territory he remembered from his rickshaw ride; but its ambiguities had fled before the invading army, or else hidden their subtle heads.
And, he wondered, what of the old man he’d met at the end of that ride? Had he fallen prey to the marauders? Had his throat slit defending his little comer of Wonderland? Most likely Cal would never know. A thousand tragedies had wracked the Fugue in recent hours – the old man’s fate was just part of a greater horror. A world was going to ash and dust around them.
And up ahead, the architect of these outrages. Cal saw the Salesman now, at the heart of the carriage, his face blazing with triumph. The sight made him put aside any thought of safety. With de Bono at his heels, he pitched into the thick of the battle.
There was scarcely a foot of clear ground between the bodies; the closer he got to Shadwell, the thicker the smell of blood and burning flesh became. He was soon separated from de Bono in the confusion, but it didn’t matter any longer. His priority had to be the Salesman; every other consideration fell away. Maybe it was this purposefulness which got him through the blood-letting alive, though bullets filled the air like flies. His very indifference was a kind of blessedness. What he failed to notice, failed in turn to notice him. Thus he went unscathed through the heart of the battle, until he was within ten yards of Shadwell.
He cast around amongst the slain at his feet, in search of a weapon, and laid his hands on a machine-gun. Shadwell was dismounting from the beast he’d been riding, and turning his back on the conflict. There were a mere handful of defenders left between him and the Mantle, and they were already falling. He was seconds only from entering the Gyre. Cal raised the gun, and pointed it towards the Prophet.
But before his finger could find the trigger something rose up from feasting at his side, and came at him. One of the Magdalene’s children, flesh between its teeth. He might have tried to kill it, but recognition slurred his intent. The creature that tore the gun from his hand was the self-same that had almost murdered him at the warehouse: his own child.
It had grown; it now stood half as tall again as Cal. But for all its bulk it was no sloth. Its fingers reached for him swift as lightning, and he only ducked them by the slimmest of margins, flinging himself down amid the corpses, where it doubtless intended to lay him permanently.
In desperation he sought the fallen gun, but before he could locate it the child came in fresh pursuit, its weight pulping the bodies it trod upon. Cal attempted to roll out from beneath it, but the beast was too quick, and snatched hold of his hair and throat. He clutched at the corpses, seeking purchase as the creature hauled him up, but his fingers slid over their gaping faces, and he was suddenly an infant in the embrace of his own monstrous off-spring.
His wild eyes caught fleeting sight of the Prophet. The Mantle’s last defenders were dead. Shadwell was yards from the wall of the cloud. Cal struggled against the beast until his bones were about ready to break, but to no avail. This time the child intended to complete its task of patricide. Cal’s last breath was steadily pressed from his lungs.
In extremis, he clawed at the polluted mirror before him, and through the dusky air saw gobs of the child’s flesh come away. There was a rush of bluish matter – like its mother’s stuff – the chill of which slapped him back from dying, and he drove his fingers deeper into the beast’s face. Its size had been gained at the price of durability. Its skull was wafer thin. He made a hook of his fingers, and pulled. The beast howled, and dropped him, the filth of its workings spilling out.
Cal dragged himself to his feet, in time to hear de Bono calling his name. He looked up towards the shout, vaguely aware that the ground beneath him was trembling, and that those who could were fleeing the battlefield. De Bono had an axe in his hand. He threw it towards Cal, as the by-blow, its head cratered, came for him again.
The weapon fell short, but Cal was over the bodies and to it in an instant, turning to face the beast at
his back with a sideways blow that opened a wound in its flank. The carcass loosed a stinking froth of matter, but the child didn’t fall. Cal swung again, opening the cut further; and again. This time the beast’s hands went to the wound, and its head was lowered as it peered at the damage. Cal didn’t hesitate. He raised the axe and brought it down on the child’s skull. The blade divided the head to the neck, and the by-blow toppled forward, the axe still buried in its body.
Cal looked about him for a sign of de Bono, but the rope-dancer was nowhere to be seen. Nor was there any other living person, Kind or Cuckoo, visible through the smoke. The battle had ended. Those who’d survived it, on either side, had retreated; and with reason. The shuddering in the earth had intensified; it seemed the ground was ready to gape and swallow the field.
He turned his gaze back towards the Mantle. There was a raw-edged tear in the cloud. Beyond it, darkness. Shadwell, of course, had gone.
Without hesitating to compute the consequences, Cal stumbled through the devastation towards the cloud, and entered its darkness.
3
Suzanna had seen the conclusion of Cal’s struggle with the by-blow from a distance, and might have reached him in time to prevent his going into the Gyre alone, but the tremors that rocked the Narrow Bright had Shadwell’s army in sudden panic, and she came closer to being killed in their haste to get to safe ground than she’d been in the conflict itself. She was running against the tide, through smoke and confusion. By the time the air had cleared, and she’d oriented herself. Shadwell had dismounted and disappeared into the Gyre, and Cal was following.
She called to him, but the earth was in further convulsions, and her voice was lost beneath its roars. She cast one final look round to see Nimrod helping one of the wounded away from the Bright, then she began towards the wall of cloud, into which Cal had now vanished.
Her scalp tingled; the power of the place she stood before was immeasurable. There was every chance that it had already annihilated those foolhardy enough to trespass inside; but she couldn’t be certain of that, and as long as there was a sliver of doubt she had to act. Cal was there, and whether he was dead or alive she had to go to him.
His name on her lips, as a keepsake and a prayer, she followed where he’d gone, into the living heart of Wonderland.
Part Nine
Into the Gyre
‘Upon our heels a fresh perfection treads.’
John Keats
Hyperion
I
TRESPASSERS
1
lways, worlds within worlds.
In the Kingdom of the Cuckoo, the Weave; in the Weave, the Fugue; in the Fugue, the world of Mimi’s book, and now this: the Gyre.
But nothing that she’d seen in the pages or places she’d visited could have prepared Suzanna for what she found waiting behind the Mantle.
For one thing, though it had seemed as she stepped through the cloud-curtain that there’d been only night awaiting her on the other side, that darkness had been an illusion.
The landscape of the Gyre was lit with an amber phosphorescence that rose from the very earth beneath her feet. The reversal upset her equilibrium completely. It was almost as if the world had turned over, and she was treading the sky. And the true heavens?; they were another wonder. The clouds pressed low, their innards in perpetual turmoil, as if at the least provocation they’d rain lightning on her defenceless head.
When she’d advanced a few yards she glanced behind her, just to be certain that she knew the route back. But the door, and the battlefield of the Narrow Bright beyond, had already disappeared; the cloud was no longer a curtain but a wall. A spasm of panic clutched her belly. She soothed it with the thought that she wasn’t alone here. Somewhere up ahead was Cal.
But where? Though the light from the ground was bright enough for her to walk by, it – and the fact that the landscape was so barren – conspired to make a nonsense of distance. She couldn’t be certain whether she was seeing twenty yards ahead of her, or two hundred. Whichever, there was no sign of human presence within range of her eyesight. All she could do was follow her nose, and hope to God she was heading in the right direction.
And then, a fresh wonder. At her feet, a trail had appeared; or rather two trails, intermingled. Though the earth was impacted and dry – so much so that neither Shadwell nor Cal’s footfalls had left an indentation, where the invaders had trodden the ground seemed to be vibrating. That was her first impression, at least. But as she followed their route the truth became apparent: the soil along the path pursuer and pursued had taken was sprouting.
She stopped walking and went down on her haunches to confirm the phenomenon. Her eyes weren’t misleading her. The earth was cracking, and yellow-green tendrils, their strength out of all proportion to their size, were corkscrewing up out of the cracks, their growth so fast she could watch it happening. Was this some elaborate defence mechanism on the Gyre’s part? Or had those ahead of her carried seeds into this sterile world, which the raptures here had urged into immediate life? She looked back. Her own route was similarly marked, the shoots only just appearing, while those in Cal and Shadwell’s path – with a minute or more’s headway – were already six inches high. One was uncurling like a fern; another had pods; a third was spiny. At this rate of growth they’d be trees within an hour.
Extraordinary as the spectacle was, she had no time to study it. Following this trail of proliferating life, she pressed on.
2
Though she’d picked up her pace to a trot, there was still no sign of those she was following. The flowering path was the only proof of their passing.
She was soon obliged to run well off the trail, for the plants, growing at exponential rate, were spreading laterally as well as vertically. As they swelled it became clear how little they had in common with the Kingdom’s flora. If they had sprung from seeds brought in on human heels, the enchantments here had wrought profound changes in them.
Indeed the resemblance was less to a jungle than to some undersea reef, not least because the plants’ prodigious growth made them sway as if moved by a tide. Their colours and their forms were utterly various; not one was like its neighbour. All they had in common was their enthusiasm for growth, for fruitfulness. Clouds of scented pollen were being expelled like breaths; pulsing blossoms were turning their heads to the clouds, as if the lightning was a kind of sustenance; roots were spreading underfoot with such violence the earth trembled.
Yet there was nothing threatening in this surge of life. The eagerness here was simply the eagerness of the new born. They grew for the pleasure of growing.
Then, from off to her right, she heard a cry; or something like a cry. Was it Cal? No; there was no sign of the trail dividing. It came again, somewhere between a sob and a sigh. It was impossible to ignore, despite her mission. Promising herself only the briefest of detours, she followed the sound.
Distance was so deceptive here. She’d advanced perhaps two dozen yards from the trail when the air unveiled the source of the sound.
It was a plant, the first living thing she’d seen here beyond the limits of the trail, with which it shared the same multiplicity of forms and brilliance of colour. It was the size of a small tree, its heart a knot of boughs so complex she suspected it must be several plants growing together in one spot. She heard rustling in the blossom-laden thicket, and amongst the serpentine roots, but she couldn’t see the creature whose call had brought her here.
Something did become apparent, however: that the knot at the centre of the tree, all but lost amongst the foliage, was a human corpse. If she needed further confirmation it was in plain sight. Fragments of a fine suit, hanging from the boughs like the sloughed skins of executive snakes; a shoe, parcelled up in tendrils. The clothes had been shredded so that the dead flesh could be claimed by flora; green life springing up where red had failed. The corpse’s legs had grown woody, and sprouted knotted roots; shoots were exploding from its innards.
There was
no time to linger and look; she had work to do. She made one circuit of the tree, and was about to return to the path when she saw a pair of living eyes staring out at her from the leaves. She yelped. They blinked. Tentatively, she reached forward, and parted the twigs.
The head of the man she’d taken for dead was on almost back to front, and his skull had been cracked wide open. But everywhere the wounds had bred sumptuous life. A beard, lush as new grass, grew around a mossy mouth which ran with sap; floret-laden twigs broke from the cheeks.
The eyes watched her intently, and she felt moist tendrils reaching up to investigate her face and hair.
Then, its blossoms shaking as it drew breath, the hybrid spoke. One long, soft word.
‘Amialive.’
Was it naming itself? When she’d overcome her surprise, she told it she didn’t understand.
It seemed to frown. There was a fall of petals from its crown of flowers. The throat pulsed, and then regurgitated the syllables, this time better punctuated.
‘Am ia live?’
‘Are you alive?’ she said, comprehending now. ‘Of course. Of course you’re alive.’
‘I thought I was dreaming,’ it said, its eyes wandering from its perusal of her a while, then returning. ‘Dead, or dreaming. Or both. One moment … bricks in the air, breaking my head …’
‘Shearman’s house?’ she said.
‘Ah. You were there?’
‘The Auction. You were at the Auction.’
It laughed to itself, and its humour tingled against her cheek.
‘I always wanted … to be inside …’ he said, … inside …’
And now she understood the how and why of this. Though it was odd to think – odd? it was incredible – that this creature had been one of Shadwell’s party, that was what she construed. Injured, or perhaps killed in the destruction of the house, he’d somehow been caught up in the Gyre, which had turned his broken body to this flowering purpose.