Black Bottle (35 page)

“Something to drink,” he said. “That’s quite a climb.” He sat down at her kitchen table even though he didn’t feel tired. The small heavy trestle that supported him was gray and gashed from tools.

“Five thousand feet, give or take,” she said as she opened the icebox. She pulled out a jar of dark cloudy liquid and poured him half a glass. “Loring tea,” she explained, then filled it with ice, sugar and heavy cream exactly as he liked.

She set it in front of him. He said thank you. She smiled and turned to wipe off the countertop.

He lifted the drink and noticed a shape in the middle of her table. A red dark shadow more than a book. He felt as if he should have been surprised. “My uncle’s book.”

“If you say so.” She sat down across from him.

“What do you mean by that?”

“It hasn’t been his in a long time.”

“You’re right,” he said.

He downed the whole glass of tea. He was incredibly thirsty. Sun from the windows hit pans and kettles hanging overhead, reflecting burning copper pools into the kitchen’s depths. Sena leveled her eyes at him. “I need to tell you something. But we can’t let him hear. You have to keep it secret. No matter what happens. You can’t repeat what I’m going to say.”

Caliph’s attention riveted to her eyes. “What?”

“I’m pregnant.”

“What?” It was like an echo.

There was a timing problem. When had this happened? But he felt reflexively warm inside. He choked slightly. Then smiled. The smile spread. He saw it mirrored on her face, a slow but definite upwelling of happiness that pushed both corners of her lips up. And the issues of when and how … where this had happened … all faded into dull unimportant doubts. He was overjoyed. This meant they were together. For real. They had a future.

Caliph had wanted this for so long.

Maybe it was foolish to interpret this as some kind of cement that would hold them together, keep her from disappearing, but he did. Somehow this made everything official.

He leapt from his seat and moved around the table to sit beside her. The fashionably cut cashmere obscured her waist. He began to suspect what it was hiding. But no. He put his hand under the delicate wool, against the smooth warmth of her belly. There was no sign. He looked at her face, confused, but her smile didn’t waver.

“It’s too early,” she whispered. “I’ve been holding her for you. It’s a girl.”

“Holding her?” He felt like they were talking in a church.

“We can do that.” Her voice was barely audible even in the small area of the kitchen. “Hjolk-trull can do that.”

Caliph grappled with the possibilities of what she was saying. How could it be? Her organs became cryptic and mysterious. He had no idea if this was really possible. He remembered her eyes ghosted with clurichaun fire, full of playfulness. Had it happened then? He was still disoriented with respect to time.

She was touching his neck. “What should we name her?”

Caliph’s mind was empty of girl names. He tried to think. What would she want him to choose? Maybe he should suggest naming it after her. No. He had a better idea. “We could name her after your mother.”

Sena’s mouth plucked with delight. “My mother?”

“Why not?” said Caliph. “She had a beautiful name.”

“Aislinn,” Sena whispered in his ear.

“Aislinn.”

There was a knock at the door. Caliph scowled and got up to answer it.

“Caliph—”

But he had already opened it. And there it stood, black and stooped, already reaching into the house. Something in a robe almost. Caliph smelled that familiar old-man smell. It trickled into everything, insinuating itself through the cottage like dust or smoke.

Its hand reached out and rested on the top of his skull.

The past intruded on the present. It sickened him, swirling like a bowl of his own vomit, stinking in front of his face. He tried to shut the door but it was too late. Nathaniel had already come inside.

Caliph turned to look at Sena. She had apologetic eyes. Why? This was
his
fault. He had opened the door.

He felt the cottage change back into his bedroom. He felt the math of his uncle’s house again, the air of that place—twenty years ago—it had bent his bones. It had modified his skull, crushed his eyes into hard skeptical wedges. And it was doing it again. He was squeezed down, out of adulthood, back into his six-year-old frame. He was back in the house on Isca Hill.

Vaguely, Caliph felt himself lying on his back; he could almost hear Dr. Baufent trying to rouse him. But that place was far away. His teeth were pestles, grinding on the fabric of the dream. They could not cut through. He could not wake up. He could not remember what Sena had done, for which he was supposed to be angry and repulsed.

Sena’s cottage disappeared. She was calling to him but her words were quickly fading away. Replacing them was his uncle’s voice. It demanded that he show himself.

“Stay with me,” said Sena.

Caliph sat up. He was covered with ashes from lying in the fireplace. This was where he had played hide-and-seek with his imaginary friends. Uncle had raged at him for tracking ashes across the carpets. He knew he was supposed to come out when his uncle called, but he stayed where he was.

The fireplace was galaxy-black. Caliph got to his feet, standing among the deep pornographic carvings that his uncle had commissioned from Niloran stonecutters. His blood bubbled, his face felt like it had been coated in hot honey. Inside him, there was thunder. He was angry at his uncle. It felt like his skeleton might shake apart.

“Caliph!” his uncle called.

But Caliph stayed hidden, ashamed that he wasn’t brave enough to come out. He had never been brave. When he played at dolls with the girls down the lane, the boys from the nearest farmhouse had called him names. They pushed him so hard into the road that he wound up with gravel in his hands. After the boys left, the girls kissed his scratches and gave him phantom tea and medicine, but eventually they forgot him, called away by parents that didn’t like them playing with the boy from Isca Hill. Caliph was ostracized because of his uncle.

“Caliph!” Nathaniel’s voice had reached fury.

He felt Sena’s hand tug gently on his fingers. Somehow she was in the fireplace with him. Small, just like him. “I’m not one of those girls,” she said. “I’m not going to leave you.”

Caliph pushed her up against the carvings, smelling sweet mint. She laughed and held his wrists. “Shh—he’ll find us.”

Caliph looked out into his bedroom. His uncle was standing right there in front of the hearth, eyes like spider bellies, staring right through him.

It was impossible that Nathaniel couldn’t see them. But this
was
a dream.

“If you say so,” she whispered.

“What did you give me to drink?”

Sena put his hands on the bones of her pelvis, the muscles of her lower back. She looked at him seriously.

“Shuwt tincture,” she said. “So that you can follow me.”

He wanted to follow her. He wanted to protect her … and the baby … from his uncle, from everything wrong with the world.

He looked over his shoulder. The old man’s eyes were still on him. He decided he had to come out.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said.

“Yes I do.”

“You can’t tell him what I told you.”

“I won’t. I promise.”

He left her among the carvings and stepped out into the room. The instant he did, his uncle’s voice grew calmer.

“Caliph. There you are. Don’t you listen to that little witch. She’s going to get you into trouble.”

Caliph looked fearfully toward the fireplace but Sena was not there. He wondered where she had gone.

Nathaniel reached out and took hold of Caliph. He lifted him off the floor. Caliph felt the heat of his uncle’s hands, as if there was fever in them. Nathaniel sat down next to the bed and put Caliph in his lap. The lights were low. Caliph felt himself ease into the soft warm pocket between his uncle’s arm and belly. Nathaniel rocked him with an oaken creak. The chair moved reassuringly, measuring the increments of minutes, a kind of grinding percussion to accompany the sadness of birds beyond the window.

“When I was young,” Nathaniel’s voice began softly, entreating and persuasive, “my half-brother and I went hunting.”

The bedtime story had begun. Nathaniel’s hands became finger-legs that trudged slowly over the landscape of Caliph’s lap. “One evening we stopped at the top of a hill,” his finger-legs stopped, “and watched the ducks rise out of the marsh.” The old man made quacking sounds. “We had bead guns. And we got them ready.” Noises of glassy ammunition clicking into chambers. “We aimed carefully. And then we fired!” Nathaniel made zipping sounds through his teeth and his two hands became both the ducks in flight and the glass beads speeding toward them.” One duck fell and landed in a shadow of Nathaniel’s robe. “Then,” he said, “we walked down into the marsh and looked for it. We walked up and down in the reeds, up and down in the grass, up and down. Up and down. But we never found it…”

The mystery was too much for Caliph’s young head and he dared to ask, “Where did it go?”

Nathaniel’s fingers spread like those of a street magician who had just vanished a card. “I don’t know. We never found it. That’s what she’s going to do to you, Caliph. Pay attention. Or you’re going to disappear. You’re going to disappear and never be found.”

The old man’s voice was positively chilling.

“Now off to bed. You understand?” He set Caliph on the floor and patted his butt. “And remember. Don’t you listen to her. Don’t you follow her. Don’t look for her. Because you’ll wind up lost. Forever. Where no one can find you.”

Caliph swallowed hard as he climbed into bed. When he laid down, he imagined himself cut open on a table with his uncle blowing into his lungs with a reed. “Useless,” said Nathaniel. Then his uncle thrust a steel probe down into Caliph’s chest. It went all the way through. Caliph could taste the metal, like the duralumin zeppelin beam that had killed him.

He woke with a start, breathing strenuously.

But the dream seemed never-ending. His bed swallowed him like a rumpled white ocean. Nathaniel was gone and the trees outside the huge warped window were barren and black and the sky was gold with morning. He looked at his hands in the light and they were small.

I’ll build a kite this morning,
he heard himself think—but it was not him. He was still a stowaway in his own skull. Eavesdropping.
A kite big enough to carry me away from here.

Then a hand touched him from behind. He jumped with surprise and fear but arms encircled him. He turned, and in turning was enveloped by the shadow of her neck, the sweet toasty smell of her lotus-pink hair. Her blue lips kissed him sexually, not as a woman kisses a child. And he wanted her. As a boy wants his first young schoolteacher. She tasted of candy floss. Warm and soft and splendid.

It isn’t bad, uncle,
he thought angrily. It isn’t bad if she makes me fall where I’m never found.
This is it.
He turned into her carnival of colors.
I’ve found it, uncle. I’ve found it.

The duck landed here.

20
Holomorphy measures its cost in cuts. According to holomorphic charts, the human body contains seven cuts.

CHAPTER

27

The fall from Sandren had lasted over a minute. Then the four witches had leveled off and landed in the blue-green coils of a vast wind-shaken grassland north and east of Seatk’r, a mile beyond the point where the ghetto’s fingers of glittering trash flowed like artificial effluence down the foothills’ morning-shadowed ravines.

This was the story Caliph heard. He remembered none of it. The
Odalisque
and the
Bulotecus
had both descended for the pick-up. Caliph had been unresponsive. As the flagship of the Iscan Crown, the
Bulotecus
maintained a tiny room packed with medical necessities. Caliph had been put on a stretcher and hauled on board. Taelin too, had been ferried over from the
Odalisque
for treatment. Even Miriam had been stitched up.

Crews were shuffled. Dr. Baufent had come over to the
Bulotecus.
She attended to Caliph personally. She had administered first aid, but Caliph had come out of his daze under his own power. Even when Caliph pressed her, Baufent denied having given him any kind of tincture.

“No, I did not,” she had said. “What do you mean a tincture?” Caliph’s insistent questions had put her on the defensive. “I don’t even know what a tincture would be. I can assure you I have no idea what you are talking about.”

He had asked about Sena.

“No. Miss Iilool was certainly never here. I think she would have been arrested the moment she set one foot on this ship.

“No she didn’t give me any tincture for you to drink. King Howl, look at me.” She had shined a chemiostatic light into his eyes.

“You’re delirious. You’ve been hallucinating.”

*   *   *

I
SHAM
Wade and Mr. Veech looked at the four witches with deep skepticism while Anselm and Baufent held their opinions like clipboards, close to their chests.

Caliph’s head was still foggy but he clung to the moment as best he could, trying to pay sedulous attention. His head was still swimming with echoes of dreams, visions … hallucinations? He didn’t know what to call them.

All the ranking members of the crew had been gathered on the
Bulotecus’
rear deck. When they weren’t staring at the witches, they were staring at him.

They think I’m losing it.

Among the noteworthies were the physicians, the airship captain, Sig and the Iycestokians—Whom Caliph had not been able to justify keeping locked up. Lady Rae was asleep in one of the staterooms.

The
Bulotecus
had moored in Seatk’r.

That much Caliph knew for sure.

“I really must demand a private audience,” Mr. Wade hissed in Caliph’s ear. Meanwhile the witches were explaining Alani’s death.