Imajica

  Oscar didn’t come home until the middle of the night, slipping into bed beside her as gently as his bulk allowed. She pretended to wake. He murmured a few words of apology for stirring her, and then some of love. Feigning a sleepy tone, she told him she was going to see her friend Clem tomorrow night, and did he mind? He told her she should do whatever she wanted, but keep her beautiful body for him. Then he kissed her shoulder and neck and fell asleep.

  She had arranged to meet Clara at eight in the evening, outside the church, but she left for that rendezvous two hours before in order to go via her old flat. She didn’t know what place in the scheme of things the carved blue eye had, but she’d decided the night before that it should be with her when they made their attempt to liberate Celestine.

  The flat felt cold and neglected, and she spent only a few minutes there, first retrieving the eye from her wardrobe, then quickly leafing through the mail—most of it junk—that had arrived since she’d last visited. These tasks completed, she set out for Highgate, taking Dowd’s advice and hailing a taxi to do so. It delivered her to the church twenty-five minutes early, only to find that Clara was already there.

  “Have you eaten, my girl?” Clara wanted to know.

  Jude told her she had.

  “Good,” Clara said. “We’ll need all our strength tonight.”

  “Before we go any further,” Jude said, “I want to show you something. I don’t know what use it can be to us, but I think you ought to see it.” She brought the parcel of cloth out of her bag. “Remember what you said about Celestine plucking the thoughts out of your head?”

  “Of course.”

  “This is what did the same to me.”

  She began to unwrap the eye, a subtle tremor in her fingers as she did so. Four months and more had passed since she’d hidden it away with such superstitious care but her memory of its effect was undimmed, and she half expected it to exercise some power now. It did nothing, though; it lay in the folds of its covering, looking so unremarkable she was almost embarrassed to have made such a show of unveiling it. Clara, however, stared at it with a smile on her lips.

  “Where did you get this?” she said.

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “This is no time for secrets,” Clara snapped. “How did you come by it?”

  “It was given to my husband. My ex-husband.”

  “Who by?”

  “His brother.”

  “And who’s his brother?”

  She took a deep breath, undecided even as she drew it whether she’d expel it again as truth or fabrication.

  “His name’s Oscar Godolphin,” she said.

  At this reply Clara physically retreated from Judith, almost as though this name was proof of the plague.

  “Do you know Oscar Godolphin?” she said, her tone appalled.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Is he the watchdog?” she said.

  “Yes, he is.”

  “Cover it up,” she said, shunning the eye now. “Cover it up and put it away.” She turned her back on Judith, running her crabbed hands through her hair. “You and Godolphin?” she said, half to herself. “What does that mean? What does that mean?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” Jude said. “What I feel for him and what we’re doing now are completely different issues.”

  “Don’t be naïve,” Clara replied, glancing back at Jude. “Godolphin’s a member of the Tabula Rasa, and a man. You and Celestine are both women, and his prisoners—”

  “I’m not his prisoner,” Jude said, infuriated by Clara’s condescension. “I do what I want when I want.”

  “Until you defy history,” Clara said. “Then you’ll see how much he thinks he owns you.” She approached Jude again, taking her voice down to a pained whisper. “Understand this,” she said. “You can’t save Celestine and keep his affections. You’re going to be digging at the very foundations—literally, the foundations—of his family and his faith, and when he finds out—and he will, when the Tabula Rasa starts to crumble—whatever’s between you will mean nothing. We’re not another sex, Judith, we’re another species. What’s going on in our bodies and our heads isn’t remotely like what’s going on in theirs. Our hells are different. So are our heavens. We’re enemies, and you can’t be on both sides in a war.”

  “It isn’t war,” Jude said. “If it was war I’d be angry, and I’ve never been calmer.”

  “We’ll see how calm you are, when you see how things really stand.”

  Jude took another deep breath. “Maybe we should stop arguing and do what we came to do,” she said. Clara looked at her balefully. “I think stubborn bitch is the phrase you’re looking for,” Jude remarked.

  “I never trust the passive ones,” Clara said, betraying a trace of admiration.

  “I’ll remember that.”

  The tower was in darkness, and the trees clogged the lamplight from the street, leaving the forecourt shadowy and the route down the flank of the building virtually lightless. Clara had obviously wandered here by night many times, however, because she went with confidence, leaving Jude to trail, snared by the brambles and stung by the nettles it had been easy to avoid in the sunshine. By the time she reached the back of the tower, her eyes were better accustomed to the murk and found Clara standing twenty yards from the building, staring at the ground.

  “What are you doing back here?” Jude said. “We know there’s only one way in.”

  “Barred and bolted,” she said. “I’m thinking there may be some other entrance to the cellar under the turf, even if it’s only a ventilation pipe. The first thing we should do is locate Celestine’s cell.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “We use the eye that took you traveling,” Clara said. “Come on, come on, give it over.”

  “I thought it was too tainted to be touched.”

  “Not at all.”

  “The way you looked at it . . .”

  “It’s loot, my girl. That’s what repulsed me. It’s a piece of women’s history traded between two men.”

  “I’m sure Oscar didn’t know what it was,” she said, thinking even as she defended him that this was probably untrue.

  “It belongs to a great temple—”

  “He certainly doesn’t loot temples,” Jude said, taking the contentious item from her pocket.

  “I’m not saying he does,” Clara replied. “The temples were brought down long before the line of the Godolphins was even founded. Well, are you going to hand it over or not?”

  Jude unwrapped the eye, discovering in herself a reluctance to share it she hadn’t anticipated. It was no longer as unremarkable as it had been. It gave off a subtle luminescence, blue and steady, by which she and Clara could see each other, albeit faintly.

  Their gazes met, the eye’s light gleaming between them like the glance of a third conspirator, a woman wiser than them both, whose presence—despite the dull murmur of traffic, and jets droning through the clouds above—exalted the moment. Jude found herself wondering how many women had gathered in the glow of this light or its like down the ages: gathered to pray, or make sacrifice, or shelter from the destroyer. Countless numbers, no doubt, dead and forgotten but, in this brief time out of time, reclaimed from anonymity; not named, but at least acknowledged by these new acolytes. She looked away from Clara, towards the eye. The solid world around her suddenly seemed irrelevant—at best a game of veils, at worst a trap in which the spirit struggled and, struggling, gave credence to the lie. There was no need to be bound by its rules. She could fly beyond it with a thought. She looked up again to confirm that Clara was also ready to move, but her companion was glancing out of the circle, towardsthe corner of the tower.

  “What is it?” Jude said, following the direction of Clara’s gaze. Somebody was approaching them through the darkness, in the walk a nonchalance she could name in a syllable: “Dowd.”

  “You know him?” Clara said.

  “A little,” Dowd said, his voice as casual
as his gait. “But really, there’s so much she doesn’t know.”

  Clara’s hands dropped from Jude’s, breaking the charm of three.

  “Don’t come any closer,” Clara said.

  Surprisingly, Dowd stopped dead in his tracks, a few yards from the women. There was sufficient light from the eye for Jude to pick out his face. Something, or things, seemed to be crawling around his mouth, as though he’d just eaten a handful of ants and a few had escaped from between his lips.

  “I would so love to kill you both,” he said, and with the words further mites escaped and ran over his cheeks and chin. “But your time will come, Judith. Very soon. For now, it’s just Clara. . . . It is Clara, isn’t it?”

  “Go to hell, Dowd,” Jude said.

  “Step away from the old woman,” Dowd replied.

  Jude’s response was to take hold of Clara’s arm. “You’re not going to hurt anybody, you little shit,” she said.

  There was a fury rising in her the like of which she’d not felt in months. The eye was heavy in her hand; she was ready to brain the bastard with it if he took a step towards them.

  “Did you not understand me, whore?” he said, moving towards her as he did so. “I told you: Step away!”

  In her rage she went to meet his approach, raising her weighted hand as she did so, but in the instant that she let go of Clara he sidestepped her, and she lost sight of him. Realizing that she’d done exactly as he’d planned, she reeled around, intending to take hold of Clara again. But he was there before her. She heard a shout of horror and saw Clara staggering away from her attacker. The mites were at her face already, blinding her. Jude ran to catch hold of her before she fell, but this time Dowd moved towards her, not away, and with a single blow struck the stone from Jude’s hand. She didn’t turn to reclaim it but went to Clara’s aid. The woman’s moans were terrible; so were the tremors in her body.

  “What have you done to her?” she yelled at Dowd.

  “Undone, lovely, undone. Let her be. You can’t help her now.”

  Clara’s body was light, but when her legs buckled she carried Jude down with her. Her moans had become howls now, as she reached up to her face as if to scratch out her eyes, for there the mites were at some agonizing work. In desperation Jude tried to feel for the creatures in the darkness, but either they were too fast for her fingers or they’d gone where fingers couldn’t follow. All she could do was beg for a reprieve.

  “Make them stop,” she said to Dowd. “Whatever you want, I’ll do, but please make them stop.”

  “They’re voracious little sods, aren’t they?” he said.

  He was crouching in front of the eye, the blue light illuminating his face, which wore a mask of chilling serenity. As she watched he picked mites from around his mouth and let them drop to the ground.

  “I’m afraid they’ve got no ears, so I can’t call them back,” he said. “They only know how to unmake. And they’ll unmake anything but their maker. In this case, that’s me. So I’d leave her alone, if I were you. They’re indiscriminate.”

  She turned her attention back to the woman in her arms. Clara had given up scratching at her eyes, and the tremors in her body were rapidly diminishing.

  “Speak to me,” Jude said. She reached for Clara’s face, a little ashamed of how tentative Dowd’s warning had made her.

  There was no answer from the body, unless there were words in Clara’s dying moans. Jude listened, hoping to find some vestigial sense there, but there was none. She felt a single spasm pass down Clara’s spine, as though something in her head had snapped, and then the whole system stopped dead. From the moment when Dowd had first appeared, perhaps ninety seconds had passed. In that time every hope that had gathered here had been undone. She wondered if Celestine had heard this tragedy unfold, another’s suffering adding to her own sum.

  “Dead, then, lovey,” Dowd said.

  Jude let Clara’s body slip from her arms into the grass.

  “We should be going,” he went on, his tone so bland they might have been forsaking a picnic instead of a corpse. “Don’t worry about Clara. I’ll fetch what’s left of her later.”

  She heard the sound of his feet behind her and stood up, rather than be touched by him. Overhead, another jet was roaring in the clouds. She looked towards the eye, but it too had been unmade.

  “Destroyer,” she said.

  Twenty-eight

  I

  GENTLE HAD FORGOTTEN HIS short exchange with Aping about their shared enthusiasm for painting, but Aping had not. The morning after the wedding in Athanasius’ cell, the sergeant came to fetch Gentle and escorted him to a room at the other end of the building, which he had turned into a studio. It had plenty of windows, so the light was as good as this region was ever likely to supply, and he had gathered over the months of his posting here an enviable selection of materials. The products of this workplace were, however, those of the most uninspired dilettante. Designed without compositional skill and painted without sense of color, their only real point of interest lay in their obsessiveness. There were, Aping proudly told Gentle, one hundred and fifty-three pictures, and their subject was unchanging: his child, Huzzah, the merest mention of whom had caused the loving portraitist such unease. Now, in the privacy of his place of inspiration, he explained why. His daughter was young, he said, and her motherdead; he’d been obliged to bring her with him when orders from Iahmandhas moved him to the Cradle.

  “I could have left her in L’Himby,” he told Gentle. “But who knows what kind of harm she’d have come to if I’d done that? She’s a child.”

  “So she’s here on the island?”

  “Yes, she is. But she won’t step out of her room in the daytime. She’s afraid of catching the madness, she says. I love her very much. And as you can see”—he indicated the paintings—“she’s very beautiful.”

  Gentle was obliged to take the man’s word for it. “Where is she now?” he asked.

  “Where she always is,” Aping said. “In her room. She has very strange dreams.”

  “I know how she feels,” Gentle said.

  “Do you?” Aping replied, with a fervor in his voice that suggested that art was not, after all, the subject Gentle had been brought here to debate. “You dream too, then?”

  “Everybody does.”

  “That’s what my wife used to tell me.” He lowered his voice. “She had prophetic dreams. She knew when she was going to die, to the very hour. But I don’t dream at all. So I can’t share what Huzzah feels.”

  “Are you suggesting that maybe I could?”

  “This is a very delicate matter,” Aping said. “Yzordderrexian law prohibits all prophetics.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Especially women, of course,” Aping went on. “That’s the real reason I keep her out of sight. It’s true, she fears the madness, but I’m afraid for what’s inside her even more.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m afraid if she keeps company with anyone but me she’ll say something out of turn, and N’ashap will realize she has visions like her mother.”

  “And that would be—”

  “Disastrous! My career would be in tatters. I should never have brought her.” He looked up at Gentle. “I’m only telling you this because we’re both artists, and artists have to trust each other, like brothers, isn’t that right?”

  “That’s right,” said Gentle. Aping’s large hands were trembling, he saw. The man looked to be on the verge of collapse. “Do you want me to speak to your daughter?” he asked.

  “More than that . . .”

  “Tell me.”

  “I want you to take her with you, when you and the mystif leave. Take her to Yzordderrex.”

  “What makes you think we’re going there—or anywhere, come to that?”

  “I have my spies, and so does N’ashap. Your plans are better known than you’d like. Take her with you, Mr. Zacharias. Her mother’s parents are still alive. They’ll look after her.??
?

  “It’s a big responsibility to take a child all that way.”

  Aping pursed his lips. “I would of course be able to ease your departure from the island, if you were to take her.”

  “Suppose she won’t go?” Gentle said.

  “You must persuade her,” he said simply, as though he knew Gentle had long experience of persuading little girls to do what he wanted.

  Nature had played Huzzah Aping three cruel tricks. One, it had lent her powers that were expressly forbidden under the Autarch’s regime; two, it had given her a father who, despite his sentimental dotings, cared more for his military career than for her; and, three, it had given her a face that only a father could ever have described as beautiful. She was a thin, troubled creature of nine or ten, her black hair cut comically, her mouth tiny and tight. When, after much cajoling, those lips deigned to speak, her voice was wan and despairing. It was only when Aping told her that her visitor was the man who’d fallen into the sea and almost died that her interest was sparked.