“Nothing so trite, lovey. Nothing so natural. I insulted you, calling you a shadow. You’re more miraculous than that. You’re—” He stopped. “Well, wait. This isn’t strictly fair. Here’s me telling you what I know and getting nothing from you.”
“I don’t know anything,” Jude said. “I wish I did.”
Dowd stooped and picked up a blossom, one of the few underfoot that was still intact. “But whatever Quaisoir knows you also know,” he said. “At least about how it all came apart.”
“How what came apart?”
“The Reconciliation. You were there. Oh, yes, I know you think you’re just an innocent bystander, but there’s nobody in this, nobody, who’s innocent. Not Estabrook, not Godolphin, not Gentle or his mystif. They’ve all got confessions as long as their arms.”
“Even you?” she asked him.
“Ah, well, with me it’s different.” He sighed, sniffing at the flower. “I’m an actor chappie. I fake my raptures. I’d like to change the world, but I end up as entertainment. Whereas all you lovers”—he spoke the word contemptuously—“who couldn’t give a fuck about the world as long as you’re feeling passionate, you’re the ones who make the cities burn and the nations tumble. You’re the engines in the tragedy, and most of the time you don’t even know it. So what’s an actor chappie to do, if he wants to be taken seriously? I’ll tell you. He has to learn to fake his feelings so well he’ll be allowed off the stage and into the real world. It’s taken me a lot of rehearsal to get where I am, believe me. I started small, you know; very small. Messenger. Spear-carrier. I once pimped for the Unbeheld, but it was just a one-night stand. Then I was back serving lovers—”
“Like Oscar.”
“Like Oscar.”
“You hated him, didn’t you?”
“No, I was simply bored, with him and his whole family. He was so like his father, and his father’s father, and so on, all the way back to crazy Joshua. I became impatient. I knew things would come around eventually, and I’d have my moment, but I got so tired of waiting, and once in a while I let it show.”
“And you plotted.”
“But of course. I wanted to hurry things along, towards the moment of my . . . emancipation. It was all very calculated. But that’s me, you see? I’m an artist with the soul of an accountant.”
“Did you hire Pie to kill me?”
“Not knowingly,” Dowd said. “I set some wheels in motion, but I never imagined they’d carry us all so far. I didn’t even know the mystif was alive. But as things went on, I began to see how inevitable all this was. First Pie’s appearance. Then your meeting Godolphin, and your falling for each other. It was all bound to happen. It was what you were born to do, after all. Do you miss him, by the way? Tell the truth.”
“I’ve scarcely thought about him,” she replied, surprised by the truth of this.
“Out of sight, out of mind, eh? Ah, I’m so glad I can’t feel love. The misery of it. The sheer, unadulterated misery.” He mused a moment, then said, “This is so much like the first time, you know. Lovers yearning, worlds trembling. Of course last time I was merely a spear-carrier. This time I intend to be the prince.”
“What do you mean, I was born to fall for Godolphin? I don’t even remember being born.”
“I think it’s time you did,” Dowd said, tossing away the flower as he approached her. “Though these rites of passage are never very easy, lovey, so brace yourself. At least you’ve picked a good spot. We can dangle our feet over the edge while we talk about how you came into the world.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “I’m not going near that hole.”
“You think I want to kill you?” he said. “I don’t. I just want you to unburden yourself of a few memories. That’s not asking too much, is it? Be fair. I’ve given you a glimpse of what’s in my heart. Now show me yours.” He took hold of her wrist. “I won’t take no for an answer,” he said, and drew her to the edge of the well.
She’d not ventured this close before, and its proximity was vertiginous. Though she cursed him for having the strength to drag her here, she was glad he had her in a tight hold.
“Do you want to sit?” he said. She shook her head. “As you like,” he went on. “There’s more chance of your falling, but it’s your decision. You’ve become a very self-willed woman, lovey, I’ve noticed that. You were malleable enough at the beginning. That was the way you were bred to be, of course.”
“I wasn’t bred to be anything.”
“How do you know?” he said. “Two minutes ago you were claiming you don’t even remember the past. How do you know what you were meant to be? Made to be?” He glanced down the well. “The memory’s in your head somewhere, lovey. You just have to be willing to coax it out. If Quaisoir sought some Goddess, maybe you did too, even if you don’t remember it. And if you did, then maybe you’re more than Joshua’s Peachplum. Maybe you’ve got some place in the action I haven’t accounted for.”
“Where would I meet Goddesses, Dowd?” Jude replied. “I’ve lived in the Fifth, in London, in Notting Hill Gate. There are no Goddesses.”
Even as she spoke she thought of Celestine, buried beneath the Tabula Rasa’s tower. Was she a sister to the deities that haunted Yzordderrex? A transforming force, locked away by a sex that worshiped fixedness? At the memory of the prisoner, and her cell, Jude’s mind grew suddenly light, as though she’d downed a whisky on an empty stomach. She had been touched by the miraculous, after all. So if once, why not many times? If now, why not in her forgotten past?
“I’ve got no way back,” she said, protesting the difficulty of this as much for her own benefit as Dowd’s.
“It’s easy,” he replied. “Just think of what it was like to be born.”
“I don’t even remember my childhood.”
“You had no childhood, lovey. You had no adolescence. You were born just the way you are, overnight. Quaisoir was the first Judith, and you, my sweet, are only her replica. Perfect, maybe, but still a replica.”
“I won’t . . . I don’t . . . believe you.”
“Of course you must refuse the truth at first. It’s perfectly understandable. But your body knows what’s true and what isn’t. You’re shaking, inside and out. . . .”
“I’m tired,” she said, knowing the explanation was pitifully weak.
“You’re feeling more than weary,” Dowd said. “Admit it.”
As he pried, she remembered the results of his last revelations about her past: how she’d dropped to the kitchen floor, hamstrung by invisible knives. She dared not succumb to such a collapse now, with the well a foot from where she stood, and Dowd knew it.
“You have to face the memories,” he was saying. “Just spit them out. Go on. You’ll feel better for it, I promise you.”
She could feel both her limbs and her resolve weakening as he spoke, but the prospect of facing whatever lay in the darkness at the back of her skull—and however much she distrusted Dowd, she didn’t doubt there was something horrendous there—was almost as terrifying as the thought of the well taking her. Perhaps it would be better to die here and now, two sisters extinguished within the same hour, and never know whether Dowd’s claims were true or not. But then suppose he’d been lying to her all along—the actor chappie’s finest performance yet—and she was not a shadow, not a replica, not a thing bred to do service, but a natural child with natural parents: a creature unto herself, real, complete? Then she’d be giving herself to death out of fear of self-discovery, and Dowd would have claimed another victim. The only way to defeat him was to call his bluff; to do as he kept urging her to do and go into the darkness at the back of her head, ready to embrace whateverrevelations it concealed. Whichever Judith she was, she was; whether real or replica, natural or bred. There was no escape from herself in the living world. Better to know the truth, once and for all.
The decision ignited a flame in her skull, and the first phantoms of the past appeared in her mind’s eye.
“Oh, my
Goddess,” she murmured, throwing back her head. “What is this? What is this?”
She saw herself lying on bare boards in an empty room, a fire burning in the grate, warming her in her sleep and flattering her nakedness with its luster. Somebody had marked her body while she slept, daubing upon it a design she recognized—the glyph she’d first seen in her mind’s eye when she’d made love with Oscar, then glimpsed again as she passed between Dominions—the spiraling sign of her flesh, here painted on flesh itself in half a dozen colors.
She moved in her sleep, and the whorls seemed to leave traces of themselves in the air where she’d been, their persistence exciting another motion, this other in the ring of sand that bounded her hard bed. It rose around her like the curtain of the Borealis, shimmering with the same colors in which her glyph had been painted, as though something of her essential anatomy was in the very air of the room. She was entranced by the beauty of the sight.
“What are you seeing?” she heard Dowd asking her.
“Me,” she said, “lying on the floor . . . in a circle of sand. . . .”
“Are you sure it’s you?” he said.
She was about to pour scorn on his question, when she realized its import. Perhaps this wasn’t her, but her sister.
“Is there any way of knowing?” she said.
“You’ll soon see,” he told her.
So she did. The curtain of sand began to wave more violently, as if seized by a wind unleashed within the circle. Particles flew from it, intensifying as they were thrown against the dark air: motes of the purest color rising like new stars, then dropping again, burning in their descent, towards the place where she, the witness, lay. She was lying on the ground close to her sister, receiving the rain of color like a grateful earth, needing its sustenance if she was to grow and swell and become fruitful.
“What am I?” she said, following the fall of color to snatch a glimpse of the ground it was falling upon.
The beauty of what she’d seen so far had lulled her into vulnerability. When she saw her own unfinished body, the shock threw her out of the remembrance like a blow. Suddenly she was teetering on the wall’s edge again, with Dowd’s hand the only check upon her falling. Icewater sweat filled her pores.
“Don’t let me go,” she said.
“What are you seeing?” he asked her.
“Is this being born?” she sobbed. “Oh, Christ, is this being born?”
“Go back to the memory,” he said. “You’ve begun it, so finish it!” He shook her. “Hear me? Finish it!”
She saw his face raging before her. She saw the well, yearning behind. And in between, in the firelit room awaiting her in her head, she saw a nightmare worse than both: her anatomy, barely made, lying in a circle of perverted enchantments, raw until the distillates of another woman’s body put skin on her sinew and color in that skin, put the tint in her eyes and the gloss on her lips, gave her the same breasts, belly, and sex. This was not birth, it was duplication. She was a facsimile, a likeness stolen from a slumbering original.
“I can’t bear it,” she said.
“I did warn you, lovey,” Dowd replied. “It’s never easy, reliving the first moments.”
“I’m not even real,” she said.
“Let’s stay clear of the metaphysics,” came the reply. “What you are, you are. You had to know sooner or later.”
“I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it.”
“But you are bearing it,” Dowd said. “You just have to take it slowly. Step by step.”
“No more. . . .”
“Yes,” he insisted. “A lot more. That was the worst. It’ll get easier from now on.”
That was a lie. When memory took her again, almost without her inviting it, she was raising her arms above her head, letting the colors congeal around her outstretched fingers. Pretty enough, until she let one arm drop beside her and her new-made nerves felt a presence at her side, sharing the womb. She turned her head and screamed.
“What is it?” Dowd said. “Did the Goddess come?”
It was no Goddess. It was another unfinished thing, gaping at her with lidless eyes, putting out its colorless tongue, which was still so rough it could have licked her new skin off her. She retreated from it, and her fear aroused it, the pale anatomy shaken by silent laughter. It too had gathered motes of stolen color, she saw, but it had not bathed in them; rather, it had caught them in its hands, postponing the moment it attired itself until it had luxuriated in its flayed nakedness.
Dowd was interrogating her again. “Is it the Goddess?” he was asking. “What are you seeing? Speak it out, woman! Speak it—”
His demand was cut suddenly short. There was a beat of silence, then a cry of alarm so shrill her conjuring of the circle and the thing she’d shared it with vanished. She felt Dowd’s grip on her wrist slip, and her body toppled. She flailed as she fell, and more by luck than design her motion threw her sideways, along the rim of the well, rather than pitching her within. Instantly, she began to slip down the incline. She clutched at the pavement. But the stone had been polished by years of passage, and her body slid towards the edge as if the depths were calling in a long-neglected debt. Her legs kicked empty air, her hips sliding over the well’s lip while her fingers sought some purchase, however slight—a name etched a little deeper than the rest; a rose thorn, wedged between stones—that would give her some defense against gravity. As she did so she heard Dowd cry out a second time, and she looked up to see a miracle.
Quaisoir had survived the mite. The change that had come over her flesh when she rose in defiance of Dowd was here completed. Her skin was the color of the blue eye; her face, so lately maimed, was bright. But these were little changes, beside the dozen ribbons of her substance, several yards in length, that were unraveled around her, their source her back, their purpose to touch in succession the ground beneath her and raise her up into a strange flight. The power she’d found in the Bastion was blazing in her, and Dowd could only retreat before it, to the edge of the well. He kept his silence now, dropping to his knees, preparing to crawl away beneath the spiraling skirts of filament.
Jude felt slip what little hold her fingers had and let out a cry for help.
“Sister?” Quaisoir said.
“Here!” Jude yelled. “Quickly.”
As Quaisoir moved towards the well, the tendrils’ lightest touch enough to propel her forward, Dowd made his move, ducking beneath the tendrils. He’d mistimed his escape, however. One of the filaments caught his shoulder and, spiraling around his neck, pitched him over the edge of the well. As he went, Jude’s right hand lost its purchase entirely, and she began to slide, a final desperate yell coming from her as she did so. But Quaisoir was as swift in saving as dispatching. Before the well’s rim rose to eclipse the scene above, Jude felt the filaments seize her wrist and arm, their spirals instantly tightening around her. She seized them in return, her exhausted muscles quickened by the touch, and Quaisoir drew her up over the edge of the well, depositing her on the pavement. She rolled over onto her back and panted like a sprinter at the tape, while Quaisoir’s filaments unknitted themselves and returned to serve their mistress.
It was the sound of Dowd’s begging, echoing up from the well where he was suspended, that made her sit up. There was nothing in his cries she might not have predicted from a man who’d rehearsed servitude over so many generations. He promised Quaisoir eternal obedience and utter self-abnegation if only she’d save him from this terror. Wasn’t mercy the jewel in any heavenly crown, he sobbed, and wasn’t she an angel?
“No,” Quaisoir said. “Nor am I the bride of Christ.”
Undeterred, he began a new cycle of descriptions and negotiations: what she was; what he would do for her, in perpetuity. She would find no better servant, no humbler acolyte. What did she want, his manhood?; it was nothing; he would geld himself there and then. She only had to ask.
If Jude had any doubt as to the strength Quaisoir had gained, she had evidence of it now,
as the tendrils drew their prisoner up from the well. He gushed like a holed bucket as he came.
“Thank you, a thousand times, thank you—”
In view now, he was in double jeopardy, Jude saw, his feet hanging over empty air and the tendrils around his throat tight enough to throttle him, had he not relieved their pressure by thrusting his fingers between noose and neck. Tears poured down his cheeks, in theatrical excess.
“Ladies,” he said. “How do I begin to make amends?”
Quaisoir’s response was another question. “Why was I misled by you?” she said. “You’re just a man. What do you know about divinities?”
Dowd looked afraid to reply, not certain which would be more likely to prove fatal, denial or affirmation.
“Tell her the truth,” Jude advised him.
“I served the Unbeheld once,” he said. “He found me in the desert and sent me to the Fifth Dominion.”
“Why?”
“He had business there.”
“What business?”
Dowd began to squirm afresh. His tears had dried up. The drama had gone from his voice.
“He wanted a woman,” he said, “to bear him a son in the Fifth.”
“And you found one?”
“Yes, I did. Her name was Celestine.”
“And what happened to her?”
“I don’t know. I did what I was asked to do, and—”
“What happened to her?” Quaisoir said again, more forcefully.
“She died,” Dowd replied, trailing that possibility to see if it was challenged. When it wasn’t he took it up with fresh gusto. “Yes, that’s what happened. She perished. In childbirth, so I believe. Hapexamendios impregnated her, you see, and her poor body couldn’t bear the responsibility.”
Dowd’s style was by now too familiar to deceive Jude. She knew the music he put into his voice when he lied, and heard it clearly now. He was well aware that Celestine was alive. There had been no such music in his early revelations, however—his talk of procuring for Hapexamendios—which seemed to indicate that this was indeed a service he’d done the God.