"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 stilt 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 succ.u.mb 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 whatever revelations 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 G.o.ddess," 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 tuster. 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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. Sud-, denly 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s, belly, and s.e.x. 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 G.o.ddess come?" It was no G.o.ddess. 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 G.o.ddess?" 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 pa.s.sage, 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 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 rehea.r.s.ed 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 G.o.d.
"What about the child?" Quaisoir asked him. "Was it a son or a daughter?"
"I don"t know," he said. "Truly, I don"t."
Another lie, and one his captor sensed. She loosened the noose, and he dropped a few inches, letting out a sob of terror and clutching at the filaments in his panic.
"Don"t drop me! Please G.o.d, don"t drop me!"
"What about the child?"
"What do 1 know?" he said, tears beginning again, only this time the real thing. "I"m nothing. I"m a messenger. A spear-carrier."
"A pimp," she said.
"Yes, that too. I confess it. I"m a pimp! But it"s nothing, it"s nothing. Tell her, Judith! I"m just an actor chappie. A f.u.c.king worthless actor chappie!"
"Worthless, eh?"
"Worthless!"
"Then good night," Quaisoir said, and let him go.
The noose slipped through his fingers with such suddenness he had no time to take a faster hold, and he dropped like a dead man from a cut rope, not even beginning to shriek for several seconds, as though sheer disbelief had silenced him until the iris of smoky sky above him had closed almost to a dot. When his din finally rose it was high-pitched, but brief.
As it stopped, Jude laid her palms against the pavement and, without looking up at Quaisoir, murmured her thanks, in part for her preservation but at least as much for Dowd"s dispatch.
"Who was he?" Quaisoir asked.
"I only know a little part of this," Jude replied.
"Little by little," Quaisoir said. "That"s how we"ll understand it all. Little... by ... little."
Her voice was exhausted, and when Jude looked up she saw the miracle was leaving Quaisoir"s cells. She had sunk to the ground, her unfurled flesh withdrawing into her body, the beatific blue fading from her skin. Jude picked herself up and hobbled from the edge of the hole.
Hearing her footsteps, Quaisoir said, "Where are you going?"
"Just away from the well," Jude said, laying her brow and her palms against the welcome chill of the wall. "Do you know who I am?" she asked Quaisoir, after a little time.
"Yes," came the soft reply. "You"re the me I lost. You"re the other Judith."
"That"s right." She turned to see that Quaisoir was smiling, despite her pain.
"That"s good," Quaisoir said. "If we survive this, maybe you"ll begin again for both of us. Maybe you"ll see the visions I turned my back on."
"What visions?"
Quaisoir sighed. "I was loved by a great Maestro once," she said. "He showed me angels. They used to come to our table in sunbeams. I swear. Angels in sunbeams. And I thought we"d live forever, and I"d learn all the secrets of the sea. But I let hurt lead me out of the sun. I let him persuade me the spirits didn"t matter. Only our will mattered, and if we willed pain, then that was wisdom. I lost myself in such a little time, Judith. Such a little time." She shuddered. "I was blinded by my crimes before anyone ever took a knife to me."
Jude looked pityingly on her sister"s maimed face. "We"ve got to find somebody to clean your wounds," she said.
"I doubt there"s a doctor left alive in Yzordderrex," Quaisoir replied. "They"re always the first to go in any revolution, aren"t they? Doctors, tax collectors, poets...."
"If we can"t find anybody else, I"ll do it," Jude said, leaving the security of the wall and venturing back down the incline to where Quaisoir sat.
"I thought I saw Jesus Christ yesterday," she said. "He was standing on a roof with his arms open wide. I thought he"d come for me, so that I could make my confession, That"s why I came here: to find Jesu. I heard his messenger."
"That was me."
"You were ... in my thoughts?"
"Yes."
"So I found you instead of Christos. That seems like a greater miracle." She reached out towards Jude, who took her hand. "Isn"t it, sister?"
"Tm not sure yet," Jude said. "I was myself this morning. Now what am I? A copy, a forgery."
The word brought Klein"s b.a.s.t.a.r.d Boy to mind: Gentle the faker, making profit from other people"s genius. Is that why he"d obsessed upon her? Had he seen in her some subtle clue to her true nature and followed her out of devotion to the sham she was?
"I was happy," she said, thinking back to the good times she"d shared with him. "Maybe I didn"t always realize I was happy, but I was. I was myself."
"You still are."
"No," she said, as close to despair as she could ever remember being. "I"m a piece of somebody else."
"We"re all pieces," Quaisoir said. "Whether we were born or made." Her fingers tightened around Jude"s hand. "We"re all hoping to be whole again. Will you take me back up to the palace?" she said. "We"ll be safer there than here."
"Of course," Jude replied, helping her up.
"Do you know which direction to go?"
She said she did. Despite the smoke and the darkness, the walls of the palace loomed above them, ma.s.sive but remote.