"Which direction is the light going to come from when it comes?" Gentle asked, turning in his saddle to scan the horizon. As he craned around to look back the way they"d come, a murmur of distress escaped his lips.
"What is it?" the mystif said, bringing its beast to a halt and following Gentle"s gaze.
It didn"t need telling. A column of black smoke was rising from the cradle of the hills, its lower plumes tinged with fire. Gentle was already slipping from his saddle, and now he scrambled up the rock face at their side to get a better sense of the fire"s location. He lingered only seconds at the top before scrambling down, sweating and panting.
"We have to turn back," he said.
"Why?"
"Beatrix is burning."
"How can you tell from this distance?" Pie said.
"I know, d.a.m.n it! Beatrix is burning! We have to go back." He climbed onto his doeki and started to haul it around on the narrow path.
"Wait," said Pie. "Wait, for G.o.d"s sake!"
"We have to help them," Gentle said, against the rock face. "They were good to us."
"Only because they wanted us out!" Pie replied.
"Well, now the worst"s happened, and we have to do what we can."
"You used to be more rational than this."
"What do you mean, used to be? used to be? You don"t know anything about me, so don"t start making judgments. If you won"t come with me, f.u.c.k you!" You don"t know anything about me, so don"t start making judgments. If you won"t come with me, f.u.c.k you!"
The doeki was fully turned now, and Gentle dug his heels into its flanks to make it pick up speed. There had only been three or four places along the route where the road had divided. He was certain he could retrace their steps back to Beatrix without much problem. And if he was right, and it was the town that was burning up ahead, he would have the column of smoke as a grim marker.
The mystif followed, after a time, as Gentle knew it must. It was happy to be called a friend, but somewhere in its soul it was a slave.
They didn"t speak as they traveled, which was not surprising given their last exchange. Only once, as they mounted a ridge that laid the vista of foothills before them, with the valley in which Beatrix nestled still out of sight but unequivocally the source of the smoke, did Pie"oh"pah murmur, "Why is it always fire?" and Gentle realized how insensitive he"d been to his companion"s reluctance to return. The devastation that undoubtedly lay before them was an echo of the fire in which its adopted family had perished-a matter that had gone undiscussed between them since.
"Shall I go from here without you?" he asked.
The mystif shook its head. "Together, or not at all," it said.
The route became easier to negotiate from there on. The inclines were mellower and the track itself better kept, but there was also light in the sky, as the long-delayed dawn finally came. By the time they finally laid their eyes on the remains of Beatrix, the peac.o.c.k-tail glory Gentle had first admired in the heavens over Patashoqua was overhead, its glamour making grimmer still the scene laid below. Beatrix was still burning fitfully, but the fire had consumed most of the houses and their birch-bamboo arbors. He brought his doeki to a halt and scoured the place from this vantage point. There was no sign of Beatrix"s destroyers.
"On foot from here?" Gentle said.
"I think so."
They tethered the beasts and descended into the village. The sound of lamentation reached them before they were within its perimeters, the sobbing, emerging as it did from the murk of the smoke, reminding Gentle of the sounds he"d heard while keeping his vigil on the hill. The destruction around them now was somehow a consequence of that sightless encounter, he knew. Though he"d avoided the eye of the watcher in the darkness, his presence had been suspected, and that had been enough to bring this calamity upon Beatrix.
"I"m responsible..." he said. "G.o.d help me... I"m responsible."
He turned to the mystif, who was standing in the middle of the street, its features drained of blood and expression.
"Stay here," Gentle said. "I"m going to find the family."
Pie didn"t register any response, but Gentle a.s.sumed what he"d said had been understood and headed off in the direction of the Splendids" house. It wasn"t simply fire that had undone Beatrix. Some of the houses had been toppled unburned, the copses around them uprooted. There was no sign of fatalities, however, and Gentle began to hope that Coaxial Tasko had persuaded the villagers to take to the hills before Beatrix"s violators had appeared out of the night. That hope was dashed when he came to the place where the Splendids" home had stood. It was rubble, like the others, and the smoke from its burning timbers had concealed from him until now the horror heaped in front of it. Here were the good people of Beatrix, shoveled together in a bleeding pile higher than his head. There were a few sobbing survivors at the heap, looking for their loved ones in the confusion of broken bodies, some clutching at limbs they thought they recognized, others simply kneeling in the b.l.o.o.d.y dirt, keening.
Gentle walked around the pile, searching among the mourners for a face he knew. One fellow he"d seen laughing at the show was cradling in his arms a wife or sister whose body was as lifeless as the puppets he"d taken such pleasure in. Another, a woman, was burrowing in among the bodies, yelling somebody"s name. He went to help her, but she screamed at him to stay away. As he retreated he caught sight of Efreet. The boy was in the heap, his eyes open, his mouth-which had been the vehicle for such unalloyed enthusiasms-beaten in by a rifle b.u.t.t or a boot. At that moment Gentle wanted nothing-not life itself-as much as he wanted the b.a.s.t.a.r.d who"d done this, standing in his sights. He felt the killing breath hot in his throat, itching to be merciless.
He turned from the heap, looking for some target, even if it wasn"t the murderer himself. Someone with a gun or a uniform, a man he could call the enemy. He couldn"t remember ever feeling this way before, but then he"d never possessed the power he had now-or rather, if Pie was to be believed, he"d had it without recognizing the fact-and agonizing as these horrors were, it was salve to his distress, knowing there was such a capacity for cleansing in him: that his lungs, throat, and palm could take the guilty out of life with such ease. He headed away from the cairn of flesh, ready to be an executioner at the first invitation.
The street twisted, and he followed its convolutions, turning a corner to find the way ahead blocked by one of the invaders" war machines. He stopped in his tracks, expecting it to turn its steel eyes upon him. It was a perfect death-bringer, armored as a crab, its wheels bristling with bloodied scythes, its turret with armaments. But death had found the bringer. Smoke rose from the turret, and the driver lay where the fire had found him, in the act of scrabbling from the machine"s stomach. A small victory, but one that at least proved the machines had frailties. Come another day, that knowledge might be the difference between hope and despair. He was turning his back on the machine when he heard his name called, and Tasko appeared from behind the smoking carca.s.s. Wretched he was, his face bloodied, his clothes filthy with dust.
"Bad timing, Zacharias," he said. "You left too late and now you come back, too late again."
"Why did they do this?"
"The Autarch doesn"t need reasons."
"He was here?" Gentle said. The thought that the Butcher of Yzordderrex had stood in Beatrix made his heart beat faster.
But Tasko said, "Who knows? n.o.body"s ever seen his face. Maybe he was here yesterday counting the children, and n.o.body even noticed him."
"Do you know where Mother Splendid is?"
"In the heap somewhere."
"Jesus..."
"She wouldn"t have made a very good witness. She was too crazy with grief. They left alive the ones who"d tell the story best. Atrocities need witnesses, Zacharias. People to spread the word."
"They did this as a warning?" Gentle said.
Tasko shook his huge head. "I don"t know how their minds work," he said.
"Maybe we have to learn, so we can stop them."
"I"d prefer to die," the man replied, "than understand filth like that. If you"ve got the appet.i.te, then go to Yzordderrex. You"ll get your education there."
"I want to help here," Gentle said. "There must be something I can do."
"You can leave us to mourn."
If there was any profounder dismissal, Gentle didn"t know it. He searched for some word of comfort or apology, but in the face of such devastation only silence seemed appropriate. He bowed his head, and left Tasko to the burden of being a witness, returning up the street past the heap of corpses to where Pie"oh"pah was standing. The mystif hadn"t moved an inch, and even when Gentle came abreast of it, and quietly told it they should go, it was a long time before it looked round at him.
"We shouldn"t have come back," it said.
"Every day we waste, this is going to happen again..."
"You think you can stop it?" Pie said, with a trace of sarcasm.
"We won"t go the long way around, we"ll go through the mountains. Save ourselves three weeks."
"You do do, don"t you?" Pie said. "You think you can stop this."
"We won"t die," Gentle said, putting his arms around Pie"oh"pah. "I won"t let us. I came here to understand, and I will."
"How much more of this can you take?"
"As much as I have to."
"I may remind you of that."
"I"ll remember," Gentle said. "After this, I"ll remember everything."
21
The Retreat at the G.o.dolphin estate had been built in an age of follies, when the oldest sons of the rich and mighty, having no wars to distract them, amused themselves spending the gains of generations on buildings whose only function was to flatter their egos. Most of these lunacies, designed without care for basic architectural principles, were dust before their designers. A few, however, became noteworthy even in neglect, either because somebody a.s.sociated with them had lived or died in notoriety or because they were the scene of some drama. The Retreat fell into both categories. Its architect, Geoffrey Light, had died within six months of its completion, choked by a bull"s pizzle in the wilds of West Riding, a grotesquerie which attracted some attention-as did the retirement from the public eye of Light"s patron, Lord Joshua G.o.dolphin, whose decline into insanity was the talk of court and coffeehouse for many years. Even at his zenith he"d attracted gossip, mainly because he kept the company of magicians. Cagliostro, the Comte de St. Germain, and even Casanova (reputedly no mean thaumaturgist) had spent time on the estate, as well as a host of lesser-known pract.i.tioners.
His Lordship had made no secret of his occult investigations, though the work he was truly undertaking was never known to the gossips. They a.s.sumed he kept company with these mountebanks for their entertainment value. Whatever his reasons, the fact that he retired from sight so suddenly drew further attention to his last indulgence, the folly Light had built for him. A diary purporting to have belonged to the choked architect appeared a year after his demise, containing an account of the Retreat"s construction. Whether it was the genuine article or not, it made bizarre reading. The foundations had been laid, it said, under stars calculated to be particularly propitious; the masons-sought and hired in a dozen cities-had been sworn to silence with an oath of Arabic ferocity. The stones themselves had been individually baptized in a mixture of milk and frankincense, and a lamb had been allowed to wander through the half-completed building three times, the altar and font placed where it had laid its innocent head.
Of course these details were soon corrupted by repet.i.tion, and Satanic purpose ascribed to the building. It became babies" blood that was used to anoint the stone, and a mad dog"s grave that marked the spot where the altar was built. Sealed up behind the high walls of his sanctum, it was doubtful that Lord G.o.dolphin even knew that such rumors were circulating until, two Septembers after his withdrawal, the inhabitants of Yoke, the village closest to the estate, needing a scapegoat to blame the poor harvest upon and inflamed by a pa.s.sage from Ezekiel delivered from the pulpit of the parish church, used the Sunday afternoon to mount a crusade against the Devil"s work and climbed the gates of the estate to raze the Retreat. They found none of the promised blasphemies: no inverted cross, no altar stained with virginal blood. But having trespa.s.sed they did what damage they could inflict out of sheer frustration, finally setting a bonfire of baled hay in the middle of the great mosaic. All the flames did was lick the place black, and the Retreat earned its nickname from that afternoon: the Black Chapel; or G.o.dolphin"s Sin.
If Jude had known anything about the history of Yoke, she might well have looked for signs of its echoes in the village as she drove through. She would have had to look hard, but the signs were there to be found. There was scarcely a house within its bounds that didn"t have a cross carved into the keystone above the door or a horseshoe cemented into the doorstep. If she"d had time to linger in the churchyard she would have found, inscribed on the stones there, entreaties to the good Lord that He keep the Devil from the living even as he gathered the dead to His Bosom, and on the board beside the gate a notice announcing that next Sunday"s sermon would be "The Lamb in Our Lives," as though to banish any lingering thought of the infernal goat.
She saw none of these signs, however. It was the road and the man at her side-with occasional words of comfort directed towards the dog on the back seat-that consumed her attention. Getting Estabrook to bring her here had been a spur-of-the-moment inspiration, but there was sound logic behind it. She would be his freedom for a day, taking him out of the clinic"s stale heat into the bracing January air. It was her hope that out in the open he might talk more freely about his family, and more particularly about brother Oscar, What better place to innocently inquire about the G.o.dolphins and their history than in the grounds of the house Charlie"s forefathers had built?
The estate lay half a mile beyond the village, along a private road that led to a gateway besieged, even in this sterile season, by a green army of bushes and creepers. The gates themselves had long ago been removed and a less elegant defense against trespa.s.ses raised: boards and corrugated iron covered with barbed wire. The storms of early December had brought down much of this barricade, however, and once the car was parked, and they both approached the gateway-Skin bounding ahead, yapping joyously-it became apparent that as long as they were willing to brave brambles and nettles, access could be readily gained.
"It"s a sad sight," she remarked. "It must have been magnificent."
"Not in my time," Estabrook said.
"Shall I beat the way through?" she suggested, picking up a fallen branch and stripping off the twigs to do so.
"No, let me," he replied, relieving her of the switch and clearing a path for them by flaying the nettles mercilessly.
Jude followed in his green wake, a kind of exhilaration seizing her as she drew closer to stepping between the gateposts, a feeling she ascribed to the sight of Estabrook so heartily engaged in this adventure. He was a very different man to the husk she"d seen slumped in a chair two weeks before. As she clambered through the debris of fallen timbers he offered her his hand, and like lovers in search of some trysting place they slipped through the broken barrier into the estate beyond.
She was expecting an open vista: a driveway leading the r eye to the house itself. Indeed, once she might have enjoyed just such a view. But two hundred years of ancestral insanities, mismanagement, and neglect had given symmetry over to chaos, parkland to pampas. What had once been artfully placed copses, built for shady dalliance, had spread and become choked woods. Lawns once leveled to perfection were wildernesses now. Several other members of England"s landed gentry, finding themselves unable to sustain the family manse, had turned their estates into safari parks, importing the fauna of lost empire to wander where deer had grazed in better-heeled times. To Jude"s eye the effect of such efforts was always bathetic. The parks were always too tended, the oaks and sycamores an inappropriate backdrop for lion or baboon. But here, she thought, it was possible to imagine wild beasts roaming. It was like a foreign landscape, dropped in the middle of England.
It was a long walk to the house, but Estabrook was already leading the way, with Skin as scout. What visions were in Charlie"s mind"s eye, Jude wondered, that drove him on with such gusto? The past, perhaps: childhood visits here? Or further back still, to the days of High Yoke"s glory, when the route they were taking had been raked gravel, and the house ahead a gathering place for the wealthy and the influential?
"Did you come here a lot when you were little?" she asked him as they plowed through the gra.s.s.
He looked around at her with a moment"s bewilderment, as though he"d forgotten she was with him.
"Not often," he said. "I liked it, though. It was like a playground. Later on, I thought about selling it, but Oscar would never let me. He had his reasons, of course..."
"What were they?" she asked him lightly.
"Frankly, I"m glad we left it to run to seed. It"s prettier this way."
He marched on, wielding his branch like a machete. As they drew closer to the house, Jude could see what a pitiful state it was in. The windows were gone, the roof was reduced to a timber lattice, the doors teetered on their hinges like drunks. All sad enough in any house, but near tragic in a structure that had once been so magnificent. The sunlight was getting stronger as the clouds cleared, and by the time they stepped through the porch it was pouring through the lattice overhead, its geometry a perfect foil for the scene below. The staircase, albeit rubble-strewn, still rose in a sweep to a half landing, which had once been dominated by a window fit for a cathedral. It was smashed now, by a tree toppled many winters before, the withered extremities of which lay on the spot where the lord and lady would have paused before descending to greet their guests. The paneling of the hallway and the corridors that led off it was still intact, and the boards solid beneath their feet. Despite the decay of the roof, the structure didn"t look unsound. It had been built to serve G.o.dolphins in perpetuity, the fertility of land and loin preserving the name until the sun went out. It was flesh that had failed it, not the other way about.
Estabrook and Skin wandered off in the direction of the dining room, which was the size of a restaurant. Jude followed a little way, but found herself drawn back to the staircase. All she knew about the period in which the house had flourished she"d culled from films and television, but her imagination rose to the challenge with astonishing ardor, painting mind pictures so intense they all but displaced the dispiriting truth. When she climbed the stairs, indulging, somewhat guiltily, her dreams of aristocracy, she could see the hallway below lit with the glow of candles, could hear laughter on the landing above and-as she descended-the sigh of silk as her skirts brushed the carpet. Somebody called to her from a doorway, and she turned expecting to see Estabrook, but the caller was imagined, and the name too. n.o.body had ever called her Peachplum.
The moment unsettled her slightly, and she went after Estabrook, as much to reacquaint herself with solid reality as for his company. He was in what had surely been a ballroom, one wall of which was a line of ceiling-high windows, offering a view across terraces and formal gardens to a ruined gazebo. She went to his side and put her arm through his. Their breaths became a common cloud, gilded by the sun through the shattered gla.s.s.
"It must have been so beautiful," she said.
"I"m sure it was." He sniffed hard. "But it"s gone forever."
"It could be restored."
"For a fortune."
"You"ve got a fortune."
"Not that big."
"What about Oscar?"
"No. This is mine. He can come and go, but it"s mine. That was part of the deal."
"What deal?" she said. He didn"t reply. She pressed him, with words and proximity. "Tell me," she said. "Share it with me."
He took a deep breath. "I"m older than Oscar, and there"s a family tradition-it goes back to the time when this house was intact-which says the oldest son, or daughter if there are no sons, becomes a member of a society called the Tabula Rasa."
"I"ve never heard of it."
"That"s the way they"d like it to stay, I"m sure. I shouldn"t be telling you any of this, but what the h.e.l.l? I don"t care any more. It"s all ancient history. So... I was supposed to join the Tabula Rasa, but I was pa.s.sed over by Papa in favor of Oscar."
"Why?"
Charlie made a little smile. "Believe it or not, they thought I was unstable. Me? Can you imagine? They were afraid I"d be indiscreet." The smile became a laugh. "Well, f.u.c.k them all. I"ll be be indiscreet." indiscreet."
"What does the Society do?"
"It was founded to prevent... let me remember the words exactly... to prevent the tainting of England"s soil the tainting of England"s soil. Joshua loved England."
"Joshua?"
"The G.o.dolphin who built this house."