Redemption in Indigo (14 page)

Paama found fear again, and it silenced her. She barely heard him as he continued to explain.

'I want you to see why chaos is not a power that should be taken up lightly. You were proud of yourself that you saved a boy from drowning. Now see if you can help anyone here. Do you hear that sound?'

She strained and heard it. It was a man weeping loudly, certain there was no one to hear, his angry words mingling with wretched sobs. Almost absently, she began to walk in the direction of the sound until she came to a dark doorway with a door standing ajar. A stale, dank odour wafted out from the shadows into the fresher, rain-washed air of the street. It smelled as if someone inside had been sick and uncared-for for a long time.

Curious, but cautious, she pushed the door open with her foot and stepped over the threshold. The rooms were large and well-furnished, but everything was filthy with dust and litter. She walked on, drawing closer to the source of the noise. Finally she found it. In a back room with a small high window, there was a man on his knees beside a bed, and in the bed a woman, stick-thin, covered with ghastly sores, her chest moving with shallow, convulsive breaths as she slowly and painfully approached her death.

'A little story,’ the indigo lord whispered in Paama's ear while the man kept up his loud wailing. ‘She is a servant of this house. She remained free of the plague for a long time but was forced to remain and care for the sick. Then came the quarantine, and those of the family who were still able to do so fled by way of bribes and secrecy. This man is engaged to her. He has been seeking her for many days, and only today did he find a way to get past the soldiers who patrol the barriers. Now he comes in time to see her die, and soon he shall die, too, for they will not let him cross over again.

'Now, human Paama, what do you think you will do with your Stick?'

'There??here is a chance that she might live, that they might both survive,’ she whispered.

'There is that chance,’ he acknowledged. ‘Is that what you will reach for?'

She glanced at him, suspecting a trick, but his face was mildly curious and nothing more. Breathing scant in the fetid air, she kept her mouth closed and nodded.

'Then do it,’ he said.

'Not as easy as it seems, hmm?'

'Leave me alone,’ Paama whispered.

Her voice was hoarse from hours of weeping. It had not moved him, nor had it irritated him. He had let her cry without a word, without even a glance of contempt, but with an unexpected patience.

'I have left you alone for some time,’ he said reasonably, ‘but now we have to go.'

Drenched in rain and miserable, Paama got up from the doorstep, keeping her back turned to the house with its two bodies and its broken mirror. She scrubbed wearily at her ears, feeling as if she would never rid them of the echoes of the woman's screams.

'I didn't think she was strong enough to stand, far less reach for the mirror,’ she mumbled, shuddering as her unrelenting memory stopped yet again at the moment when the woman used the shard of mirror glass to slice her own jugular.

Then her eyes widened in realisation and she turned on him with fresh energy.

'You knew. You could have told me,’ she accused.

'Could I? There were many outcomes. There was a chance—a very slender one, I grant you—that they could survive here until the plague died out and the quarantine was lifted. There was a chance that she would recover and he would die later—such twists may seem cruel, but they exist. There was even a chance that they would both live and find a way past the quarantine barrier into freedom. There were thousands of chances. How was I to know that the one chance you needed to know about was the chance that she would see her reflection in the mirror and prefer death to a life of disfigurement, and that he would prefer death to a life without her?'

'So, your lesson is that one should do nothing without the knowledge of every possibility?’ she asked bitterly.

'No. I only mean to show you that there are some chances that even the Stick cannot control—chances that involve the free will of a human soul.'

She thought about this for a while and then said sorrowfully, ‘Then I might as well have done nothing.'

He flexed his hands uncomfortably in a manner that she was beginning to recognise. There was something he was not telling her.

'Was there something I could have done? Is there something I can do now?’ she pressed.

He briefly clenched his hands into fists and then opened them in surrender. ‘Before I??etired?? was assigned to burn this town.'

'Burn it!’ Paama exclaimed.

He shook his head at her horrified look. ‘It is the only way to stop the plague. Otherwise so many will die that the survivors will be forced to abandon the town entirely.'

'Then let us do it!’ She did not even notice, in her enthusiasm, that she had said ‘us’ and not ‘me'.

He shook his head again. ‘It is too late. The rainy season has begun. Any fire I try to start will find sodden thatch above, soaked timbers and filled gutters below. It is too late.'

There was a strange expression on his face. It took her a few moments to identify it as guilt.

'Are you sorry that you did not do your duty?’ she asked gently.

His eyes narrowed coldly. ‘I am still not convinced that humanity is worth the effort at all.'

She looked hurt. Cold, wet, tearstained, she must have made a pitiable figure, for he looked away from her uncomfortably.

'We must go now.'

She stood and stared at him, knowing he would feel not only the look, but everything behind it. It did more than she expected. It wore him down.

'There might be a chance, if the weather were dry for a few days, that a fire might still work,’ he hinted.

'If I choose that chance, the chance of unseasonal weather, will you bring me back here in a few days?’ she asked tentatively.

He nodded and then frowned as if annoyed at himself. Seizing her wrist again, he made an impatient motion with his hand. They vanished, leaving the street of the tragic plague town empty once more.

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The djombi remembered that Paama had to eat, so they stopped in a busy, confusing, colourful metropolis where he could make himself visible without attracting very much attention. Paama found it necessary to pawn a gold coin to obtain the city's peculiar legal tender—colourful banknotes and dull coinage—before she could buy food at a small restaurant. While she ate, the djombi read from a newspaper and absently snacked on portions of her dessert ... ‘just for the taste', he said. Paama recalled how fond another djombi had been of her sugar sweets and cakes, and she smiled slightly.

'We have a ship to catch,’ he said at last, folding up the paper.

Paama found the statement interesting, but not as interesting as his action.

'Why do you read that? I thought that you knew everything,’ she asked.

He seemed surprised. ‘Where did you get the impression that I know everything? I do not know what you are thinking. I certainly do not know what you will choose to do next.'

'Except for my giving you the Stick. You seem very certain about that,’ she said dryly.

He gave her one of his unfathomable, blank looks. ‘I like to read the paper for the same reason that I like the occasional bit of food—to sample human tastes.'

'I thought you despised us,’ she said quietly.

His hands squirmed on the folded newspaper. ‘Not
despise
. Not all of human taste is abhorrent. There are bits that are enjoyable.'

'Like chocolate cake and comic strip humour?’ she murmured, eyes downcast, sarcasm mild.

'Are you eating that last piece of cake?’ he asked, unmoved by her criticism.

'That depends on what horrible thing you are going to show me next. I might need to fortify myself. Wouldn't it be more fair and balanced if you showed me something good about chance and human choice?'

'There is this ship—’ he began.

'Please!’ Paama cried, daring to interrupt. ‘Answer me! Will you be fair?'

He seemed offended. ‘I have every intention of being fair. I was trying to tell you, this ship will not be much to see at first glance, but there is something worth seeing, something rare. The point is, will
you
see it, or will you put the Stick to poor use?'

She pushed the remainder of the cake over the table towards him. ‘Eat. I have lost my appetite. I forgot that this exercise of yours is not simply to show me how unworthy humanity is, but how unworthy I am.'

'There's no need to take it so personally,’ he said, but he took the cake without any sign of remorse.

'No women on board,’ he noted. ‘I have given you a kind of invisibility. They will see you, but they will immediately forget who and what they have seen.'

He watched Paama struggling to stay upright on the surging deck.

'Try not to stumble into anyone,’ he remarked. ‘That's a little harder to forget.'

Paama doubted it. The crew members were busy. They moved quickly with the purposefulness of cogs who know precisely what is their place and function in the larger machine, but there was a touch of nervous exhilaration in their enthusiasm and preoccupation on every face.

'A storm is coming?’ she guessed.

He nodded. ‘Are you afraid?'

She set her face sternly and replied, ‘I choose not to be, thank you. Are they all going to die?'

'Not all. Not even many. Watch.'

He found her a semi-sheltered spot, and she settled in with her back braced against the boards and her feet pressed against thick coils of rope. It was better to be seated, for now even the sailors stumbled from the motion of the turbulent waves.

Paama began to hate the djombi for his talent at keeping dry. For the second time in twenty-four hours she was drenched. Both saltwater and rainwater poured over her and pooled under her. She was thoroughly miserable and so self-absorbed that it was a shock when he spoke to call something to her attention.

'Look, by the upper deck.'

Lightning struck. Several men fell flat on their faces, some from the shock of the noise, but others actually stunned from having been too close to that massive surge of power.

'See that one?'

The djombi pointed. Whether he had been blasted up there or had fallen, Paama could not tell, but a man hung tangled in lines halfway up the mainmast, either dead or unconscious. She began to reach towards the bag at her waist for the Stick.

'Not so fast,’ the djombi cautioned, holding back her hand.

'But he may be alive, and there's a chance that lightning will strike again before they get him down,’ Paama protested.

'Trust me,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘The issue is not life or death this time. It's something more.'

Men were slow to move, still shocked by the force of the bolt of lightning, but one man, one sleek, wet, dark figure went climbing up the mast. A knife was held clenched in his maniacally grinning teeth, making him look like a pantomime pirate. He reached the hanging man, took the blade in hand, and drove it into the mast's wood before gingerly leaning out and catching a trailing line to haul the inert body towards him.

'Isn't that rare, isn't that beautiful?'

Paama looked back in shock at the djombi. His face and voice had never been so animated. He saw her expression and his face fell.

'You don't understand. You can't see it. Keep watching and I'll explain later.'

The rescuer pulled his knife free and began to cut his comrade loose from the tangled ropes. As he did so, Paama began to feel a sense of something about to happen, something beyond human capacity to prevent.

'No,’ she breathed. ‘I must stop it.'

'Paama, let it be.’ His hand blocked hers gently, not forcefully, leaving her the freedom to shake it off and grab the Stick if she wished. ‘Paama,
look at the boy
.'

Distracted, she looked at the young man he was pointing out, and thus never saw the moment when lightning, striking twice in the same place, blasted the two men from the mast. She did see the young man's expression. It was too intense, even when compared to the blaze of light that illuminated it. She felt seared.

The djombi began to speak quickly. ‘The young man is the son of the man who was injured in the ropes. He has just seen his father's avowed enemy and lifelong rival give up his life to try to save him. This chance moment changes him for all time.'

'Didn't I hear you tell me before that you can't tell what people are thinking?’ she snapped at him. ‘How do you know he is changed? How can you claim to know the future which he will build out of his own choices?'

'I claim no such thing, but what I can see is how likely those choices will be, and I can tell you, Paama, many will be saved in the future when this man goes to war as a general because of this one time when he saw what it means to treat an enemy with love and honour.'

She heard his words but could not grasp that knowledge which allowed him to see the beauty in two more corpses, destroyed between fire and water. He realised. Once more he was at a loss; once more he looked at her with compassion, and regret.

The ship's crew began to recover their senses and rushed to their duties, removing the injured from the deck and striving with all their power to safeguard their own lives from the storm. It was over, and there were more things to be done—that was their way of dealing with it.

'I'm cold and wet and tired,’ said Paama.

It was a bleak statement of fact, without any hint of a plea or complaint.

'I'll take you to where you can rest,’ he replied.

He brought her to an empty tower high in the hills, a rest station used by hunters, in a country where the time was well past sunset. She was near collapse, wearied by constant travel, weakened by the elements, and grieved with loss. He put her to bed and set her to dreaming, and then went to the top of the tower to brood about his future.

Paama dreamed. If she had been able to bring with her the cushion from Sister Carmis, he would not have found her so vulnerable, but on this occasion, his influence and intent were benign, so we need not worry about her.