Force Majeure (23 page)

What’s happening?! screamed one. You’re lost, said Luna, said Quint. Get used to it.

The-Lady herself found only one man in the smoke, and that was Luis.

‘This takes me back,’ he said, chuckling. He had come into the affray armed with a walking stick. This was no longer needed, so he handed it to her to rest on. The-Lady took it gratefully, suddenly feeling every immense second of her age. It was gnarled; she twisted it in her hand and drove its point forcefully into carpet. So, she was front-stage.

‘They’re in the walls,’ she told him softly. ‘We’re breached, oh my sisters and my children and my lovers.’ Luis, she was sure, was smiling, though she could barely see him through her deadweight gasmask. He was a mountain-sized shadow in the fog. She thought of the half-poisonous smoke clinging to the walls and the furniture. That would need work, once this was over; that would need a thorough clean. Luis had sealed the library so his books would be undamaged.

The smoke would clear soon. It seethed in the silence.

Is that it? Is it over? She felt uncertain of her ground for one of the first times in her long life.

No, no it isn’t.

Luis’ head cocked, a landslide on the mountain. He had always denied his blindness had sharpened his other senses – ‘Bullshit!’ he’d growl cheerfully – but his hearing was sharper than hers. She tuned in with him, gradually picking up the thrumm of helicopter blades, beating violently against the air, a sound like wings.

This was the last of Kay’s dreams:

Helicopters weren’t designed to ride this high, above the mountaintops in the rare air touching the clouds. Odd, poetic images kept popping into the head of the gunner on Attack One. He was an American by birth and, though still young, considered himself a veteran of old, imagined wars. He wasn’t impressed by the random thoughts blitzing through his head. He attributed them to the cold, to the thrill of speed, or maybe – and this was the closest he would ever get to being romantic – to the giddy altitude. The mountains didn’t impress him; they were probably nice for painters. They were carved ice cream peaks, and the city – he didn’t know the name, that wasn’t important – was a novelty toy.

The bay doors were open. Dangerous but exhilarating, like the height. Attack One curved in the air and bobbed lower, so low that he could see details on the buildings. Toytown looked like Babylon from some angles, London from others, also Detroit, also Dubai, also Brasília, also Sydney (the crazier architecture reminded him of the deformed-skull opera house), also silent sci-fi movies, also the vast abattoir bunkers of Texas from old industrial videos. Crazy heights, crazy thoughts. He shook his head. There was money down there and there was pussy. He took out binoculars and hunted. There was a brothel at the centre of every frontier town, on every unpatrolled border and in every water margin. The gunner was haunted by a suspicion that he had never actually had real sex and that the women who had assured him otherwise were part of a malicious, smiling conspiracy to keep him a virgin.

He wrapped his free arm round the harness that would catch him if the helicopter tipped. There were a dozen other men like him sharing space in the metal belly and half a dozen more in the cockpit, including the pilots. There were five more hueys behind them. He had a gun strapped to his back like a cancerous outcrop of naked bone. Everyone around him was thinking exactly the same as him, he assumed, with only their differing discomforts to mark them out. He had shotgun, but he had violent air pummelling his face. The binocs shook in his hand. The lenses had smart chips; they focused, they zoomed, pleasing him. The big house on the mountainside was pumping smoke. A woman staggered blindly to a balcony, half naked in ragged red. The magnification tightened on her face, then her tits, red cross-hairs highlighting her body.

She climbed, she jumped, he looked away, not wanting to see her break her neck. That’d kill the dumb bitch, that fall; a waste. The huey dropped into the black clouds (or maybe it was smoke) and he stowed the binocs – they wouldn’t penetrate the colourless cotton candy of the sky. There was unexpected turbulence, and the flight banked to one side. Richter-shock, like someone had tried to shoot them down. A rocket had come up from the ground, missing but swatting them aside with its blowback. No way! These people were harmless hicks! They were the rice villagers too poor to hire samurai. Where’d they buy rockets from? Bastard’d be in orbit by now.

He leaned again out of the door and hoped they would arrive soon. He toppled sideways and plummeted. Too late he snatched for the harness, but his fingers had relaxed. He fell serenely, with no panic in his stomach. Of course, he realised, his brain flickering with the insane images brought on by blood loss and imminent death, there were no longer any fingers to clench or a stomach to turn. He’d left them aboard the helicopter. They were no longer connected to his head, which slurred and froze and died full of jewelled imaginings and fancies before it exploded on the ground.

In the hold, the other mercenaries had been half-slumbering, but suddenly they were one man short, suddenly there was a headless corpse by the hatch, arterial blood fountaining from the stump of his neck. Instinctively they assumed that something had gone wrong with the rotor, but none of them lived long enough to realise that this first impression was wrong. The pilots were the next to go, ripped direct through the canopy by curled fingers that crushed the remaining cabin crew. The helicopter swerved off course and dropped towards the earth.

There were leisurely seconds before the rest of the swarm acknowledged the loss of Attack One.

Attack Two assumed the swarm leader had decelerated and dropped back in formation alongside them. Visibility was poor in the clouds, but the pilots, always alert to the nuances of threat from the sky, detected danger in the shape now flying abreast, a hazy silhouette too big and too irregular to be another huey. Premonitions of fire prickled in their fingertips and their toetips. Dead static buzzed from the speakers on Attack One’s frequency. The co-pilot looked sideways at the flanking shape, and the hostile looked back at him with a yellow lizard eye.

The hostile smiled.

Attack Two was thrashed out of the sky by a barbed whip of a tail.

The hostile unfurled huge, leathery wings and floated above the level of the clouds. It was silhouetted black against the sun, its penumbra red as hot coals. It spat. Attacks Three and Four became fused metal coffins full of barbecued human meat. Trailing oily flame, they flew for a hundred more metres before the momentum gave and gravity drew them down.

There was panic aboard Attacks Five and Six. Men hardened to all the possibilities and cruelties of war soiled themselves or prayed or threw themselves screaming from the doors, hoping for a less painful death. One at least saw a huge, scarlet target presenting itself on the line between the land and the sky and – as the two surviving helicopters moved into sunlight – he smashed the nozzle of his gun through glass and began pumping bullets at the target-belly. If they struck, they failed to penetrate. The hostile fell on Attack Five, with its jaws wide open.

Hostile teeth went through metal and flesh and bone. Petrol ignited unfelt in its mouth.

This left Attack Six, and the hostile played with it, taking it apart with the delicate points of its claws. It snapped off rotor blades one by one. He loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not.

He loves me.

Attack Six was tossed away. It span wildly across the sky, down through the levels of cloud. The last man aboard to die was safely strapped in and sat unperturbed by the dizzying plunge, by the dislodged cargo battering his body. As he dropped, he witnessed the full, majestic, reptilian shape of the hostile. He saw it soar over the rooftops of Candida and imagined it contemplating turning its irrational violence against the city.

No, not today. It stepped gracefully out of the sky, no longer hostile, to find a safe roost to land and hibernate. And in the seconds left to him as the ruins of Attack Six span him down to die, the last man conceived an entire religion dedicated to the creature that had killed him, a beautiful death-goddess tended by a cautious army of priestesses in perfumed garden-temples concealed from the world behind high walls. He prayed to her, the dragon. He collided with a continent.

His body, already lifeless, was thrown clear. Over centuries, over millennia, the wreck of Attack Six was worn down to nothing by scavengers, weather and time. His body remained lost, pressed against the mountainside, concealed by mud that hardened and impressed round him. Oceans, jungles, mountains rose and fell, ice marched back and forth across the surface of the planet, the sun flared and dimmed red. All the while, the fossilised man kept praying, and over the mountain, Candida’s ever-changing Aurora Australis glow endured beyond his reach.

Kay woke with a violent headache and an alien growth hugging half of her face. She reached for it, and her touch was painful through thick layers. She felt delicate bone squealing above her eye. She withdrew her hand, and her fingerprints came back red, outlined in drying blood. The growth was a thick cluster of bandages. It covered one of her eyes; the one with the brighter, more colourful vision. With her good, duller, flatter eye, she looked round.

There was the dragon stain on the ceiling. She knew where she was.

There were Luna and Quint perched on Azure’s cot, briefly looking like ordinary women, slumped and painful and exhausted from a hard day’s work. There was Milo Esteban, half-sitting, half-lying across her table with his face snuggled in his folded arms. There was the faint smell of drains and scrubbed soap that she tried to turn her head from, until she realised it was ground into her skin and her hair.

Esteban noticed her moving and looked up. He was barely able to do that; his whole body ached, tangibly from feet away. She’d been in his skin twice and shared his discomfort and his exhaustion, as if it were her own.

‘She’s awake,’ he said flatly.

‘Wha’ happ’d?’ That was her voice, played back at half-speed.

‘Candida ate its enemies,’ Esteban told her simply.

They fed and watered her, and by the time they had her sat up in bed, she was strong enough to speak. As her energy crept back, so did theirs, so did Esteban’s. He told her later that she owed her life to Luna and Quint; once the house was secure, they had tracked her unconscious body down the canal. They had carried her back to the house and tended to her personally, in her room because the lazaret was full. They were soon practising their magic on her again, plucking billiard balls and chocolate mice from behind her ears. They regaled her with a story of the obscene puppet show they planned to perform for the city’s wounded.

Esteban stayed with her. He was in love with her. She had to acknowledge it, though only silently, only to herself. He treated her with kidglove reverence, as if she were fragile, as if she were too precious to be touched. He seemed to be searching her face for something, a clue that didn’t present itself, and so he relaxed. He tried to explain how Prospero had been defeated, but his account was confused. He’d been part of the raid on the clubhouse, well away from the battlefront. The raid had netted none of the ringleaders, who were presumed to have fled the city.

‘Except one,’ he said, winking. He didn’t mean Xan. He didn’t mention Xan at all, but then perhaps they had never been introduced.

‘What about the helicopters?’ she asked.

‘They crashed. It was an Act of God. Probably bad weather. The-Lady sent a party out to check and pick up any survivors. They’re all accounted for, all six. I don’t know anything about helicopters, but I don’t think they’re supposed to fly this high.’

‘Icarus,’ Kay said absently, and he didn’t hear her. She felt round the edges of her enormous bandage. It would dwindle down to the size of a plaster over the following days. In the meantime, she didn’t move from the bed but let the visitors come to her: Flower-of-the-Lady, of course, and housemaids she knew by sight but not by name; Ernesto de Broca and his bride-in-white; Team Prospero, who no longer called themselves that, particularly not Mae, who had decided to accept instruction in the Mystery of the house, being younger than Kay and open-minded; numerous prostitutes, officers and citizens who she didn’t know but who were touring the wounded; craftsmen come to fix her window and clean the smoke-damage from her walls; and a precocious five-year-old girl – representative of Godma January, who never left her cottage fastness on the city limits but sent her thanks and an apology and white bread. There were long gaps when there was no-one there, except Esteban. After several days waiting fruitlessly for him to declare, she pulled him down on top of her and they made love maskless. He was a man she could grow to tolerate.

Azure didn’t return to her room. Kay didn’t ask for her, though she was never far from her thoughts. When she tried to make enquiries, the
voladora
’s name stuck in her gullet. It wouldn’t come. It would not be said. Kay lay in impatient agony, waiting for the chance to move.

Night came. She slept lightly and awkwardly in a foetal curl, her hands tucked into the warm base of her torso. She didn’t dream, all her dreams had been used up, but her sleeping mind was conscious of sound and movement in her cell – a low scraping noise, metal on wood, working patiently and insistently through long hours. A breeze tickled her face. She wrinkled her nose and snorted and woke. She turned onto her back and lay silently while the intruder at the foot of her bed waited patiently to be recognised.