Wind buffeted him. He stood firm.
Sand. Sand and dust tickled his face, blew about him, getting into his mouth and his nose.
He coughed, spat out dust. He opened his eyes.
A red plain stretched before him.
A jumble of images a.s.saulted his vision. Inkblots-no, clouds of violet dust on the horizon. Rocks underfoot. Cold wind. A vast sky. Alien light. Some of the clouds were mountains, impossibly tall and thin.
No Josephine. Of course not, of course not, of course not. No smile, no welcome at all-in fact nothing, nothing as far as the eye could see. A dead world, an empty world.
Somewhere behind him, someone was saying, It exists, it exists. It sounded like Atwood. It exists!
He rubbed at his eyes.
His eyes! His hands, for that matter!
He patted at his arms, his chest. Solid. Flesh and bone. He was still wearing his tweed jacket. He didn"t know quite why the jacket should seem so extraordinary to him, but it did.
His head spun. He swayed and stumbled. Atwood"s voice called out Look out there! and Vaz called out something that sounded like Hey! It had hurt when he landed, knocked the breath right out of him. His breath! Arthur laughed. He lay on his back and looked up into an impossible sky, a deep dark inky starless violet, shifting and turbulent with dust-clouds. The moon-no, two moons, one red and one the other marble-pink-it was dizzying to think of them-two moons chasing each other around and around that sky-a sky that was a thousand times wider and darker and wilder than any sky that was ever seen over London-a vastness as huge and as terrifying as the face of G.o.d.
THE.
SEVENTH.
DEGREE.
{Angel and Abyss}
Chapter Twenty-seven.
If there had been newspapers in the ivory city, they would have been utterly preoccupied with the Earthwoman Question. One day there would have been editorials urging that she be investigated, the next that she be deported; demanding that she be vivisected, or given the keys to the city, or exhibited on stage, or hauled before the courts, or condemned by the Church, or prohibited by Act of Parliament, or sent off on a tour of the provinces. She"d have been mocked in cartoons. (How does one caricature a invisible ghost? They"d have found a way.) All the experts would have weighed in; and even the common Martian in the street would have had his say, writing letters calling for Something to Be Done. Or, at least, that was how it all seemed to Josephine. What was certain was that the Martians of the lunar city were fascinated and horrified in equal measure by the news that they had a ghost in their midst, a spectral interloper from the mysterious Blue Sphere.
Now that old Piccadilly had shown her how, she couldn"t help but hear their thoughts. There were so many of them, and they were so loud, like a swarm of crickets. She sensed emotions, images, longings, fears. She couldn"t help but try to communicate, sending images of the Earth and London to and fro across the city, causing confusion, ecstasy, panic, and sometimes fits of agitated swarming that might be what pa.s.sed for riots on the white moon.
Her-what was the word? her ghostliness-had some special meaning for them, something that was horrifying and revolting and compelling in equal measure. It had something to do with their flight from Mars, and with whatever horrible evil Piccadilly had feared. And apparently Martian newspapers-if they had them-were no more reliable than terrestrial ones, because the news quickly got around that all Earthpeople were ghosts. Frightened crowds demanded answers, pointed up at the sky, at the tiny blue dot that was the Earth. She tried her best to correct their misunderstanding, but without a great deal of success. She tried to describe the human body, but they appeared to think that she was making a joke.
The crowds urged her this way and that, and important-looking people came to lead her here, or there, or elsewhere, to be studied and talked to and threatened and cajoled. She demanded that Piccadilly be allowed to go with her. In part, that was because she had begun to trust him. In part it was because she pitied him, and she didn"t care for the way he"d been treated, and she felt that if there was fame and honour to be won among the Martians for subduing the Earth ghost, it properly belonged to Piccadilly. In part it was because he was the closest thing she had to a friend. He went before her into the crowded squares, shouting as if he were her prophet or holding up a red light to clear a path, like a philosopher in the marketplace. Squabbles arose around him, squalls of argument and excitement and motion. She had no clear idea what he was saying, but the role seemed to agree with him: as time went by he stood a little taller, his wings shone brighter. She felt drunk. She kept wanting to laugh.
By the time she was presented to their Parliament, the thrill of it all had worn off. She was tired of being prodded with questions, tired of being the object of fear and wonder, tired of understanding nothing, and rather afraid that she might simply disappear under the crush of attention. She wondered if that was what being famous was like back on Earth, and if so, why anyone would want it. All she could say to the Elders of Parliament was that she wanted to go home.
Parliament was her own word, of course. She didn"t know precisely what they were, this little roomful of elderly Martians. All she knew was that Piccadilly was eager to impress on her their tremendous, paramount importance and dignity. So far as she could tell, most decisions in the lunar city were made by the demos as a whole, by casting of beads after the Athenian fashion-subject, no doubt, to the influence of certain great orators or generals or philosophers. Meanwhile, decisions of great importance were reserved for a caste or cla.s.s or council of leaders, consuls, dictators-who were, perhaps, chosen for excellence of birth, not by the popular vote, and who therefore resembled Lords more than Commons ... She didn"t know. She suspected it was hopeless to try to understand the Martians in terms of terrestrial inst.i.tutions-not least because she didn"t understand those terribly well either. She certainly hadn"t been able to explain Parliament to Piccadilly.
Regardless of what one might choose to call it, the highest authority of the city took the form of nine mostly elderly Martians. There was nothing obviously grand or powerful or dignified or important about them. They wore beads and sc.r.a.ps of silk, just like everyone else; in fact, it seemed to Josephine that they were, if anything, a little shabbier than the average. It seemed to her that they were mostly women. She couldn"t quite say why-something about their manner suggested that they were matrons of their kind.
This innermost sanctum, this deepest penetralia of the lunar city, was a crowded little room that Josephine had initially taken for just one more of the hundreds of the bead workshops that could be found all across the city. In fact it was a workshop: there were tools, and work-tables, and sc.r.a.ps, and shavings, and clutter. There was an intense red fire in one corner of the room.
Three of them came shuffling forward, staring in various directions, as if hoping to catch a glimpse of her. The rest continued bead-making, working drills and needles with their fingers and their minds. First among bead-makers, Josephine thought, or stewards of the Bead-Makers" Union. Or perhaps the beads had some greater significance than she"d guessed-something military, something sacred.
She let them feel her desire to go home.
The matrons wanted to know all about Earth, and she told them what she could. By now, she"d conjured up the same images of Earth so many times and for so many questioners that they no longer seemed quite real, even to her. Under the endless pressure of questioning, questioning, questioning, she was starting to forget what was real and what wasn"t-if anything here were real-if indeed there even was a here. Sometimes London seemed like something she"d read about in a book, or recalled from a dream. Were there really green trees, and blue skies, and a black and sooty city of pink wingless apes?
She felt herself drifting again, into one of those states of vanishing in which hours or days or months might pa.s.s in the blink of an eye. She willed herself to remain present. This room, these ancient old dried-flower Martians, were real and solid things. She concentrated on one in particular, the foremost and perhaps the most ancient of the three, a creature whose wings were little more than withered petals, and whose face-unusually broad and round for a Martian-was etched with wrinkles like veins in quartz.
Piccadilly stood in a corner, shifting nervously from foot to foot, like a pigeon.
They bombarded her with questions that were at first confusing, but which she soon began to sense were of a military nature. They wanted to know about the military capacities of Earth. They seemed to have in mind an alliance between the forces of Earth and the forces of the white moon against a common enemy. She supposed it had something to do with the red moon of Mars, and with their exile from the face of Mars itself. She was rather terrified by this responsibility, and tried her best to explain that she had no power whatsoever to commit Earth to anything. They found that hard to believe, or perhaps to understand. Their military line of inquiry was confused by the fact that they appeared to have London mixed up with the Earth, and policemen mixed up with soldiers, and they had no concept of a rifle or a cannon or a gunboat, or even of swords or cavalry. Her thought of cavalry confused them even further, as they seized on the image of an armoured knight out of Arthurian legend; and then Josephine thought of dragons, and then of "Jabberwocky." That caused the matrons great consternation. Suddenly, their images of London were full of dragons coiled around Big Ben, and Jabberwocks running wild in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, while horses rode gleaming knights into battle ...
Jupiter, she was sure, wouldn"t be making such a terrible mess of things.
The matrons" next question came so clearly that she almost heard it as words: Who is Jupiter?
A hard question to answer. She tried to tell them about Jupiter, and about Martin Atwood, and Sun and Sergeant Jessop and all the rest of them, and about Atwood"s house in Mayfair and the Company of the Spheres. She called up an image of Atwood"s library, the lamps on the table and the star-maps and the mad symbols painted on the floor. That excited the matrons greatly. They wanted to know all about the Company"s methods of travel. The notion of leaving the body fascinated and appalled them. For the first time, she thought they clearly understood what had happened to her.
They wanted to know if more Earth people would come, or if she was alone.
Well, would they? She didn"t know. In recent days she"d stopped hoping that Atwood and Jupiter would appear to rescue her. Perhaps they"d never intended to rescue her at all. Perhaps they"d tried but couldn"t find her. She still held out a vague hope, contrary to all reason, that Arthur might somehow find out what had happened to her and follow her; but that hope was fading. She"d begun to accept that if she was to find her way home, she"d have to do it herself. In fact, the thought of Atwood and his Company suddenly descending from the heavens was rather worrying. One ghostly Earthwoman had created a panic-what might the Martians do if nine of them appeared in their midst?
An image of the Company at war with the lunar city entered her mind. The matrons tensed.
She uttered a quick silent prayer. That set off a further round of shock and alarm and questioning. They appeared to take her prayer for a sort of magic spell. They found her notion of G.o.d highly distasteful, and, once again, her attempts to explain only seemed to make things worse: the Holy Ghost alarmed them; h.e.l.l seemed to confirm some deep and awful suspicion; the incarnation of G.o.d in a mortal body was half-comic, half-fascinating.
The matrons started to argue. She left them to it, trying to think of nothing at all. The three conversed among themselves, fingers fluttering and wings flickering, for a very long time. Meanwhile, the rest continued shaping and drilling and inspecting beads, threading them or moving them from one pile to another, and only occasionally pausing to express agreement or disagreement with this or that. They weren"t a Parliament, or bishops or lords-they put Josephine more in mind of the Fates, weaving while they dispensed the destiny of kings and queens and nations. She named them accordingly: Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos; spinner, measurer, cutter.
With a sudden clatter of wings the Fates reached a decision.
Piccadilly stiffened, as if readying for a blow. Then he approached the table where the Fates worked. He had been summoned to testify. His wings were tightly furled and his back was bent. If he"d been an Englishman, he would have been on his knees.
He stood at the foot of the table, by the fire. He spoke quietly-that is, his motions were subdued, the colours of his wings faint. Josephine understood none of their questions to him, or his answers.
At last, Clotho reached out her fingers and entwined them in Piccadilly"s. A gesture of peace-a benediction. Piccadilly ceased trembling. Josephine thought he would have wept if he could; laid his head in Clotho"s lap like a child, weeping in grat.i.tude, and love, and fear. Clotho, still and crystalline, glittering by firelight, resembled a pagan idol, carved from gemstone.
A moment ago, while they were getting confused about London, the matrons had seemed a little ridiculous. Now, in their own sphere again, among their own subjects, they moved Josephine to awe.
Clotho rose to her feet. With a thought, she indicated that Josephine should follow her. Then she went out into the street. Piccadilly, trembling, stood and went with her. The rest of the Fates turned their attention back to bead-making.
Josephine followed Clotho and Piccadilly alongside the rose-red river, through streets of white stone shadowed by towers. She was at first surprised that Clotho would venture out into the city alone, without a bodyguard or retinue, without secretaries or footmen or maids-in-waiting. Then she saw how pa.s.sers-by looked at her, and understood that the whole city was Clotho"s bodyguard, and retinue, and everything else she could need.
Their route took them away from the river, and towards a part of the city where the buildings were for the most part uninhabited. Great white dusty mausoleums, in the shadow of the wall of the crater; cold, gloomy, and remote. In the sky, the face of Mars was deep indigo, almost invisible against the blackness, and the red moon was a tiny splash of blood.
Clotho gave no explanation. Piccadilly appeared lost in his own thoughts, sad and hopeful at once. Was it possible that they had some way for her to go home-that they were taking her to some sort of port or gateway? They"d fled the face of Mars for the white moon; they must have some way of travelling between the worlds. Piccadilly"s mood was odd-was he sorry to see her leave for her own world? Perhaps. On the other hand, it occurred to her that she might be bound for imprisonment, or execution. Her audience with the Fates had had something of the quality of a trial, and it was not at all clear to her that the verdict had been favourable.
She supposed she had no choice but to trust them. It was that or go back to haunting the cracks and corners of the city, perhaps for ever.
Clotho led them along a wide road-it had the air of a triumphal avenue, but it was silent and empty-and deeper into the gloomy districts at the city"s edge, until finally their road came to an end, dissolving into a wide expanse of rocks and rubble at the base of the crater"s wall. By now, they were entirely in shadow. The wall occluded Mars-light; at its foot there was near-total darkness. The rocks there were bare and lifeless, free of the red moss that throve everywhere else in the city. Only a faint light from the towers behind them lit their way as Piccadilly helped the ancient matron over the rough ground.
There was a cave-a deep crack, thin but tall, in the rough white rock of the crater"s edge. It was utterly dark inside. With a wave of her fingers, Clotho made a small flame in the palm of her hand, revealing a plain tunnel of stone, rough-hewn, low-ceilinged, leading down.
Josephine was far beyond being surprised by mere fire-starting; it seemed no odder than striking a match. The tunnel was nondescript; but Piccadilly was trembling, and even Clotho had an att.i.tude of quiet reverence.
The tunnel led only a little way into the underground before opening out into a great hall. Rough rock underfoot gave way to smooth and glistening paving stones. Nine-pointed pillars rose up into the darkness. The ceiling and the far walls were too distant to make out without abandoning Clotho"s little circle of firelight, which Josephine had no intention of doing. She was suddenly conscious, as with a persistent itch that she"d been reminded of, that it was utterly freezing down in that subterranean darkness. No wonder Piccadilly was trembling.
For as far as she could see, the hall was full of the dead.
Piccadilly appeared frozen. Terror and uncertainty and sorrow radiated from him. Clotho stared fixedly forward, as if waiting for Josephine to do something.
With a jerk, Piccadilly started moving again, rushing forward, moving amongst the dead almost frantically. Clotho"s light followed him.
Row upon row of Martians lay on the floor of the vault; row upon row in neat parallel lines converging in the darkness. Firelight glinted off folded wings. Curled up like sleeping children, knee-to-chin, they were surprisingly small, surprisingly vulnerable. As Piccadilly led them farther and deeper into the vault-hunting left and right, tracing his steps from memory-there was more and more dust gathered on the bodies. Some of them had been there for a very long time. Like Arthur and his knights, waiting to be woken; or like b.u.t.terflies in a case, row upon row upon row, pinned and dried and dead ...
But not quite dead; or at least, not all of them. Sometimes, as they pa.s.sed, a pair of folded wings would shift slightly, the frilled edges rippling, as if glad of the touch of firelight. Fingers twitched. Chests rose and fell, almost but not quite imperceptibly. Not dead; sleeping. Hibernating, perhaps. Dozens and dozens of them. Young and old, male and female. Some terribly scarred, some not.
Piccadilly stopped. He crouched beside the sleeping body of a young female, and gently touched her wings.
Then he and Clotho waited, as if they expected the body to wake, or Josephine to wake her. To breathe life into her.
For a moment Josephine despaired, thinking it was just more confusion, another misunderstanding; they"d taken her for a real angel, and imagined she could heal the sick, wake the dead ...
Then, all at once, she understood what they were telling her.
This was Piccadilly"s-what? Child? Wife? Friend? Child, she thought. Her mind and her spirit were gone. All of the dozens or hundreds of sleepers in the great hall were the same. They were empty; their souls and their minds were gone. Casualties of war. What war? That hardly mattered now. She could make no sense of the visions Clotho and Piccadilly were sending her. The red moon, whirling around and around; the clash of armies in the sky over the white city. She didn"t understand. What mattered was that they were offering her a body to replace the one she"d left behind in London.
Piccadilly trembled.
What sort of sacrifice was this? Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter for a fair wind, didn"t he? What had Clotho promised poor Piccadilly? Or, more important, what was Piccadilly asking of her? For her to be one of them? For her to be what to him? To fill this empty vessel with her spirit. A manifestation; a materialization; a conjuration, stranger than anything Mrs Esther Sedgley had ever imagined. A metamorphosis. Waking on another world like a Princess in a fairy tale, among elves and fairy folk, in the magic places under the hill, on the far side of the moon!
The body in question was short for a Martian, but with long and bright and very finely edged wings. It was mostly indigo, dark for a Martian-the same sort of shade as Piccadilly, in fact. It was pretty. It was monstrous. It was fascinating and revolting.
Could she enter this body? Was it possible, this unprecedented metamorphosis or resurrection or reincarnation? Did Clotho know, or was she guessing? Was this a matter of ordinary medicine on the moons of Mars, or was it a wild experiment? She"d had enough of wild experiments. Should she do it? Would she be able to leave again?
If she refused, what would become of her? Alone for ever, ghostly, drifting, dissolving into nothingness ...
With a sensation of giving herself up to a dream, Josephine moved towards the body and studied the blank silver eyes. For an instant they were like a mirror, in which she saw herself seeing herself. Then the next thing she knew there was a cacophony of sounds and sensations, an incomprehensible torrent of pain and joy and terror and feelings she couldn"t name. The sensation of her wings opening! The world seen through wide silvery eyes. Colours were a hundred times brighter, as if she"d been seeing through a fog all this time. Piccadilly was bright as a parrot. The transformation of her perceptions that had been taking place slowly during her time on the moon finally rushed to completion. She saw Piccadilly for the first time without any suggestion of the creature about him, but simply as a rather dignified old man-an old soldier, something rather like a retired Major. Clotho had the plain grandeur of an abbess.
Josephine stood. It seemed to her that she was making some sort of noise. She fell over immediately, in a tangle of unfamiliar limbs, knees and elbows striking stone. Pain was a joy.
Chapter Twenty-eight.
Mr Vaz, his head and shoulders already thickly layered with dust, sat on a rock and muttered about h.e.l.l and d.a.m.nation. Sometimes he lowered his head until it was almost on his knees, so that he appeared to be praying; he was in fact struggling for breath.
"Lord Atwood has brought us to h.e.l.l," he said. "What else would you call this? He has d.a.m.ned us."
Atwood wasn"t there to hear this indictment of his character. He"d gone off to the edge of their camp some hours ago, to confer with Sun on their predicament.
Dimmick squatted on his haunches, idly scratching with his knife in the dirt, staring into the distance. There was a haze in the air-dust, and something oddly twinkling that was not dust. It appeared to be twilight; at least, one would hope it wasn"t what pa.s.sed for daylight on Mars. At the far horizon a row of tremendous mountains met a sky of black clouds, streaked with nightshade and lurid foxglove-a venomous sky. Clouds had covered both moons, the rose and the red. Thank G.o.d-it had induced a certain odd vertigo, to see those two moons chasing each other across the heavens.
Between the expedition"s hasty and makeshift camp and the far horizon there were no signs of civilization, or greenery, or life. Green was an unknown colour here.
"h.e.l.l," said Mr Vaz.
"Shut up," Payne said.
Dimmick stood, and sheathed his knife. "Let him talk. He"s right, ain"t he? Call it what you like-this is h.e.l.l."
Vaz laughed, then started to cough.
Dimmick paced the boundaries of the camp. He was soon no more than a lumbering shadow in the haze. Among the many odd properties of the haze was that it distorted vision, unpredictably, like sea-water. He had no destination. He was keeping busy. Something in the atmosphere made joints stiffen quickly.
They"d been on Mars for perhaps half a day-it was hard to be sure. n.o.body"s watch had survived translation. They had not yet glimpsed the sun. They"d moved no more than a half-mile from the place they"d arrived, and set down what Atwood called a camp in a circle of rocks in the lee of a tall sweep of rock that gave no shelter from the cold. They grumbled, paced, quarrelled, prayed. Moods of religious horror pa.s.sed over each of them from time to time, then moved on, like the shadow of a cloud, leaving them cold and drained. There was something unnerving in the air, something a little like the stillness and pressure that on Earth would precede a storm, but here seemed to precede nothing at all. This was a dead world.
They"d arrived-manifested-in various states of weakness, disorientation, and dismay. Atwood and Sun had been up on their feet limping around within half an hour or so, but Arthur had been unable to stand for at least an hour, and one or two of the men had taken it worse. Like drowning, Vaz said, seeming to speak from experience-or like the sensations produced by the Work of Gracewell"s Engine. Just the thought of it-I am on Mars-was so strange that it made one"s legs go weak.
There were eight of them. Archer"s son had not appeared, and it seemed likely that he would not. It was better not to think about what had happened to him-what might still happen to the rest of them, for all anyone knew. Martin Atwood and Sun were off by the edge of the camp, pacing, deep in conversation-there was an occasional violet flash as Atwood lit a cigarette. Dimmick was now kicking desultorily at rocks. Vaz was doubled over coughing. Then there was the military contingent-Messrs. Payne, Frank, and Ashton.
Ashton was unwell. According to Payne, Ashton claimed to have learned magic from the feet of the Secret Mahatmas in Tibet, after deserting from the Army in India. Whatever secret learning he might or might not have acquired, it didn"t seem to have done him much good. He"d survived the transit, but only by the skin of his teeth. He lay on the ground, green at the gills and moaning softly, with his jacket wadded up as a pillow under his head. No one knew what else to do for him.
Frank and Payne and Arthur investigated the supplies.
The supplies had caught fire back in London, when Archer dropped her paraffin lamp; but now they were here. That was another thing that was best not thought about too closely. Otherwise one might begin to wonder if this really was h.e.l.l-if they weren"t, in fact, dead, and surrounded by the ghostly shadows of their former lives. But no good came of thinking that way. One could glimpse horror in a can of soup. The important thing was to keep busy. Arthur and Payne and Frank were conducting an inventory. "Keep warm, chaps," Arthur said. "Keep moving, that"s the thing. Spirits up." Frank and Payne, never a talkative pair, worked in grim silence. Wise of them, Arthur supposed. The thin air made talking hard work. Of course they were used to mountainous territory.
After a while, Vaz came and joined them.
"Are you well enough, Mr Vaz?"
"Better to work than to think, don"t you think, Mr Shaw? Wasn"t that always our method back in Deptford?"
Not all of the articles the Company had gathered had survived the transit; and some that had survived the transit had been lost, scattered all over the dunes as they moved to their current camp, through the dark and the wind, in a state of fumbling panic.
There were three small folded tents, but one was torn beyond hope of repair. There was needle and thread. Three spare pairs of boots and a dozen pairs of socks. Three loaded Martini-Henry rifles. Six knives of varying sizes. Four walking-sticks. Four camp-stools, of which three were broken. A superfluity of spoons. Nine compa.s.ses, all of which spun uselessly, apparently unable to find north. Perhaps Mars didn"t have a north. Payne lost his temper and stamped on one. Tobacco. Three belts, two coats. Not nearly the right sort of clothing for the cold; they should be wrapped up like polar explorers. Two pairs of binocular field-gla.s.ses. A canister of paraffin, for the hurricane lamps, and a tin of creosote, for use as an antiseptic. Tonic of iron and strychnine (one bottle). Isingla.s.s plaster, for open wounds. Opium, for diarrhoea. Opium for nerves. Cocaine, to maintain energy. Mescaline, and a small quant.i.ty of hashish, and G.o.d only knew what else; Atwood had packed such a quant.i.ty of drugs that it seemed to Arthur he might just as well have stayed home and taken his drugs and dreamed of whatever he wanted to dream.
Food, water. Condensed milk, beef tea, hard tack, pea soup. Two shovels. Two short and narrow sleds, of polished hickory with steel-shod runners, and with the initials M.A. carved into the side. What Arthur wouldn"t give for a pack of dogs to pull them! But of course no animal could have performed the ritual. Perhaps you could train a parrot, Arthur joked, though no one laughed. Cruel anyway, he supposed. Ice-axes: four. Tin-openers: four. One pistol.