“We’ve only got a few more walls to paint,” he said, “and we’ll have covered them all. A few days. A week at the most.”
“I wish I had that long,” Gentle told him. “But I can’t postpone the work I came back to do.”
Monday had of course been asleep while Gentle talked with Tay (and had woken much confounded by the respect he got), but the others, especially Benedict, had new words to add to the vocabulary of miracles.
“So what does a Reconciler do?” he asked Gentle. “If you’re goin’ off to the Dominions, man, we want to be comin’ with you.”
“I’m not leaving Earth. But if and when I do, you’ll be the first to know about it.”
“What if we never see you again?” Irish said.
“Then I’ll have failed.”
“And you’re dead and gone?”
“That’s right.”
“He won’t fuck up,” Carol said. “Will you, love?”
“But what do we do with what we know?” Irish said, clearly troubled by this burden of mysteries. “With you gone, it won’t make sense to us.”
“Yes, it will,” Gentle said. “Because you’ll be telling other people, and that way the stories will stay alive until the door to the Dominions is open.”
“So we should tell people?”
“Anyone who’ll listen.”
There were murmurs of assent from the assembly. Here at least was a purpose, a connection with the tale they’d heard and its teller.
“If you need us for anything,” Benedict purred, “you know where to find us.”
“Indeed I do,” Gentle said, and went with Clem to the gate.
“And what if anybody comes looking for you?” Carol called after them.
“Tell ‘em I was a mad bastard and you kicked me over the bridge.”
This earned a few grins.
“That’s what we’ll say, Maestro,” Irish said. “But I’m tellin’ you, if you don’t come back for us one of these days, we’re goin’ to come lookin’ for you.”
The farewells over, Clem and Gentle headed up onto Waterloo Bridge in search of a cab to take them across the city to Jude’s place. It wasn’t yet six, and though the flow of northbound traffic was beginning to thicken as the first commuters appeared, there were no taxis to be had, so they started across the bridge on foot in the hope of finding a cab on the Strand.
“Of all the company to have found you in,” Clem remarked as they went, “that has to be the strangest.”
“You came looking for me there,” Gentle pointed out, “so you must have had some inkling.”
“I suppose I must.”
“And believe me, I’ve kept stranger company. A lot stranger.”
“I believe it. I’d like you to tell me about the whole journey one day soon. Will you do that?”
“I’ll do my best. But it’ll be difficult without a map. I kept telling Pie I’d draw one, so that if I ever passed through the Dominions again and got lost . . .”
“You’d be found.”
“Exactly.”
“And did you make a map?”
“No. There was never time, somehow. There always seemed to be something new to distract me.”
“Tell me as much as—Whoa! I see a cab!”
Clem stepped out into the street and waved the vehicle down. They both got in and Clem supplied the driver with directions. As he was doing so, the man peered into his mirror.
“Is that someone you know?”
They looked back along the bridge to see Monday pelting towards them. Seconds later the paint-smeared face was at the taxi window, and Monday was begging to join them.
“You’ve got to let me come with you, boss. It’s not fair if you don’t. I gave you my colors, didn’t I? Where would you be without my colors?”
“I can’t risk your getting hurt,” Gentle said.
“If I get hurt it’s my hurt and it’s my fault.”
“Are we going, or what?” the driver wanted to know.
“Let me come, boss. Please.”
Gentle shrugged, then nodded. The grin, which had gone from Monday’s face during his appeal, returned in glory, and he clambered into the cab, rattling his tobacco tin of chalks like a ju-ju as he did so.
“I brought the colors,” he said, “just in case we need ‘em. You never know when we might have to draw a quick Dominion or something, right?”
Though the journey to Judith’s flat was relatively short, there were signs everywhere—mostly small, but so numerous their sum became significant—that the days of venomous heat and uncleansing storm were taking their toll on the city and its occupants. There were vociferous altercations at every other corner, and some in the middle of the street; there were scowls and furrows on every passing face.
“Tay said there was a void coming,” Clem remarked as they waited at an intersection for two furious motorists to be stopped from making nooses of each other’s neckties. “Is this all part of it?”
“It’s bloody madness is what it is,” the cabbie chimed in. “There’s been more murders in the last five days than in all of last year. I read that somewhere. And it’s not just murders, neither, it’s people toppin’ themselves. A mate of mine, a cabbie like, was up the Arsenal on Tuesday and this woman just throws herself in front of his cab. Straight under the front wheels. Bloody tragic.”
The fighters had finally been refereed and were being escorted to opposite pavements.
“I don’t know what the world’s coming to,” the cabbie said. “It’s bloody madness.”
His piece said, he turned on the radio as the traffic began moving again, and began whistling an out-of-tune accompaniment to the ballad that emerged.
“Is this something we can help stop?” Clem asked Gentle. “Or is it just going to get worse?”
“I hope the Reconciliation will put an end to it. But I can’t be certain. This Dominion’s been sealed up for so long, it’s poisoned itself with its own shit.”
“So we just have to pull down the soddin’ walls,” Monday said, with the glee of a born demolisher. He rattled his tin of colors again. “You mark ‘em,” he said, “and I’ll knock ‘em down. Easy.”
II
The child, Jude had been told, had more purpose in it than most, and she believed it. But what did that mean, besides the risk of its fury if she tried to unhouse it? Would it grow faster than others? Would she be big with it by dusk, and her water ready to break before morning? She lay in the bedroom now, the day’s heat already weighing on her limbs, and hoped the stories she’d heard from radiant mothers were true, that her body would pour palliatives into her bloodstream to ease the traumas of nurturing and expelling another life.
When the doorbell rang her first instinct was to ignore it, but her visitors, whoever they were, kept on ringing and eventually began to shout up at the window. One called for Judy; the other, more oddly, for Jude. She sat up, and for a moment it was as though her anatomy had shifted. Her heart thumped in her head, and her thoughts had to be dragged up out of her belly to form the intention to leave the room and go down to the door. The voices were still summoning her from below, but they petered out as she headed down the stairs, and she was ready to find the doorstep empty when she got there. Not so. There was an adolescent there, besmirched with color, who upon sight of her turned and hollered to her other visitors, who were across the street, peering up at her flat.
“She’s here!” he yelled. “Boss? She’s here!”
They started back across the road towards the step, and as they came her heart, still beating in her head, took up a suicidal tempo. She reached out for some support as the man at Clem’s side met her eyes and smiled. This wasn’t Gentle. At least it wasn’t the egg-thief Gentle who’d left a couple of hours before, his face flawless. This one hadn’t shaved for several days and had a brow of scabs.
She backed away from the step, her hand failing to find the door though she wanted to slam it. “Keep away from me,” she said.
He stopped a yard or two from the threshold, seeing the panic on her face. The youth had turned to him, and the imposter signaled that he should retreat, which he did, leaving the line of vision between them clear.
“I know I look like shit,” the scabby face said. “But it’s me, Jude.”
She took two steps back from the blaze in which he stood (How the light liked him! Not like the other, who’d been in shadow every time she’d set eyes on him), her sinews fluttering from toes to fingertips, their motion escalating as though a fit was about to seize her. She reached for the banister and took hold of it to keep herself from falling over.
“It can’t be,” she said.
This time the man made no reply. It was his accomplice in this deceit—Clem, of all people—who said, “Judy. We have to talk to you. Can I come in?”
“Just you,” she said. “Not them. Just you.”
“Just me.”
He came to the door, approaching her slowly, palms out. “What’s happened here?” he said.
“That’s not Gentle,” she told him. “Gentle’s been with me for the last two days. And nights. That’s . . . I don’t know who.”
The imposter heard what she was telling Clem. She could see his face over the other man’s shoulder, so shocked the words might have been blows. The more she tried to explain to Clem what had happened, the more she lost faith with what she was saying. This Gentle, waiting outside, was the man she’d left on the studio step, standing bewildered in the sun as he was now. And if this was he, then the lover who’d come to her, the egg licker and fertilizer, was some other: some terrible other.
She saw Gentle make the man’s name with his lips: “Sartori.”
Hearing the name and knowing it was true—knowing that the butcher of Yzordderrex had found a place in her bed, heart, and womb—the convulsions threatened to overtake her completely. But she clung to the solid, sweaty world as best she could, determined that these men, his enemies, should know what he’d done.
“Come in,” she said to Gentle. “Come in and close the door.”
He brought the boy with him, but she didn’t have the will to waste on objecting. He also brought a question: “Did he harm you?”
“No,” she said. She almost wished he had, wished he’d given her a glimpse of his atrocious self. “You told me he was changed, Gentle,” she said. “You said he was a monster; he was corrupted, you said. But he was exactly like you.”
She let her rage simmer in her as she spoke, working its alchemy on the abhorrence she felt and turning it into purer, wiser stuff. Gentle had misled her with his descriptions of his other, creating in her mind’s eye a man so tainted by his deeds he was barely human. There’d been no malice in his deception; only the desire to be utterly divided from the man who shared his face. But now he knew his error and was plainly ashamed. He hung back, watching her while the tremors in her body slowed. There was steel in her sinew and it held her up, lent her the strength to finish the account. There was no sense in keeping the last part of Sartori’s deceit from either Gentle or Clem. It would be apparent soon enough. She laid her hand on her belly.
“I’m pregnant,” she said. “His child. Sartori’s child.”
In a more rational world she might have been able to interpret the expression on Gentle’s face as he received the news, but its complexity defied her. There was anger in the maze, certainly, and bafflement too. But was there also a little jealousy? He hadn’t wanted her company when they’d returned from the Dominions; his mission as Reconciler had scourged his libido. But now that she’d been touched by his other, pleasured by him (did he see that guilt somewhere on her face, as ineptly buried as his jealousy?) he was feeling pangs of possessiveness. As ever with their story, there was no sentiment untainted by paradox.
It was Clem, dear comforting Clem, who opened his arms now and said, “Any chance of a hug?”
“Oh, God, yes,” she said. “Every chance.”
He crossed to her and wrapped his embrace around her. They rocked together.
“I should have known, Clem,” she said, too quietly for Gentle or the boy to hear.
“Hindsight’s easy,” he said, kissing her hair. “I’m just glad you’re alive.”
“He never threatened me. He never laid a finger on me that I didn’t . . .”
“Ask for?”
“I didn’t need to ask,” she said. “He knew.”
The sound of the front door reopening made her raise her head from Clem’s shoulder. Gentle was stepping out into the sun again, with the youth following. Once outside, he looked up, cupping his hand over his brow to study the sky at his zenith. Seeing him do so, Jude realized who the sky watcher she’d glimpsed in the Boston Bowl had been. It was a small solving, but she wasn’t about to spurn the satisfaction it provided.
“Sartori is Gentle’s brother, is that right?” Clem said. “I’m afraid I’m still hazy on the family relations.”
“They’re not brothers, they’re twins,” she replied. “Sartori is his perfect double.”
“How perfect?” Clem asked, looking at her with a small, almost mischievous smile on his face.
“Oh . . . very perfect.”
“So it wasn’t so bad, his being here?”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t bad at all,” she replied. Then, after a moment: “He told me he loved me, Clem.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“And I believed him.”
“How many dozens of men have told you that?”
“Yes, but he was different. . . .”
“Famous last words.”
She looked at the sun watcher for a few seconds, puzzled by the calm that had come over her. Was the mere memory of his commitment to her enough to assuage every dread?
“What are you thinking?” Clem asked her.
“That he feels something Gentle never did,” she replied. “Maybe never could. Before you say it, I know the whole thing’s repulsive. He’s a destroyer. He’s wiped out whole countries. How can I be feeling anything for him?”
“You want the clichés?”
“Tell me.”
“You feel what you feel. Some people go for sailors, some people go for men in rubber suits and feather boas. We do what we do. Never explain, never apologize. There. That’s all you’re getting.”
Her hands went to his face. She cupped it, then kissed it. “You are sublime,” she said. “We’re going to survive, aren’t we?”
“Survive and prosper,” he said. “But I think we’d better find your beau, for everybody’s—”
He stopped as her grip on him tightened. All trace of joy had gone from her face.
“What’s wrong?”
“Celestine. I sent him up to Highgate. To Roxborough’s tower.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not following this.”
“It’s bad news,” she said, leaving his embrace and hurrying to the front door.
Gentle relinquished his zenith watching at her summons and returned to the step as she repeated what she’d just told Clem.
“What’s up in Highgate?” he said.
“A woman who wanted to see you. Does the name Nisi Nirvana mean anything to you?”
Gentle puzzled over this for a moment. “It’s something from a story,” he said.
“No, Gentle. She’s real. She’s alive. At least she was.”
III
It hadn’t been sentiment alone that had moved the Autarch Sartori to have the streets of London depicted in such loving detail on the walls of his palace. Though he’d spent only a little time in this city—no more than weeks, between his birth and his departure for the Reconciled Dominions—Mother London and Father Thames had educated him right royally. Of course the metropolis visible from the summit of Highgate Hill, where he stood now, was vaster and grimmer than the city he’d wandered then, but there were enough signs remaining to stir some poignant and pungent memories. He’d learned sex in these streets, from the professionals around Drury Lane. He’d learned
murder at the riverside, watching the bodies washed up in the mud on a Sunday morning after the slaughters of Saturday night. He’d learned law at Lincoln’s Inn Field and seen justice done at Tyburn. All fine lessons, that had helped to make him the man he was. The only lesson he couldn’t rememberlearning, whether in these streets or any other, was how to be an architect. He must have had a tutor in that, he presumed, at some time. After all, wasn’t he the man whose vision had built a palace that would stand in legend, even though its towers were now rubble? Where, in the furnace of his genes or in his history, was the kindling spark of that genius? Perhaps he’d only discover the answer in the raising of his New Yzordderrex. If he was patient and watchful, the face of his mentor would sooner or later appear in its walls.
There would have to be a great demolishing, however, before the foundations were laid, and banalities like the Tabula Rasa’s tower, which he now came in sight of, would be the first to be condemned. He crossed the forecourt to the front door, whistling as he went and wondering if the woman Judith had been so insistent he meet—this Celestine—could hear his trill. The door stood open, but he doubted any thief, however opportunist, had dared enter. The air around the threshold fairly pricked with power, putting him in mind of his beloved Pivot Tower.
Still whistling, he crossed the foyer to a second door and stepped through it into a room he knew. He’d walked these ancient boards twice in his life: the first time the day before the Reconciliation, when he’d presented himself to Roxborough here, passing himself off as the Maestro Sartori for the perverse pleasure of shaking the hands of the Reconciler’s patrons before the sabotage he’d planned took them to Hell; the second time, the night after the Reconciliation, with storms tearing up the skies from Hadrian’s Wall to Land’s End. On this occasion he’d come with Chant, his new familiar, intending to kill Lucius Cobbitt, the boy he’d made his unwitting agent in the sabotage. Having searched for him in Gamut Street and found him gone, he’d braved the storm—there were forests uprooted and lifted in the air, and a man struck by lightning burning on Highgate Hill—only to discover that Roxborough’s house was empty. He’d never found Cobbitt.Driven from the safety of Gamut Street by his sometime Maestro, the youth had probably fallen prey to the storm, as so many others had that night.