The Day of the Nefilim (44 page)

Some days, it seems as though the water is calm, and that the Enemy is far away, and has even forgotten us, and then it is easy to forget what he can do, and our hope rises and rises, and the sky seems bright and clear, and we imagine our Tower reaching into the sky forever, full of hope and made of wonder and strength and caught breath, and on those days we are sure, and we forget the Enemy, and we pour ourselves into our work, and we build as though we have an endless stream of tomorrows before us…

Sometimes, there are those who just sit, staring down into the water, watching it rise, waiting for it to reach them, or for the Enemy to rise up and take them. (The water never reaches them; it is always the Enemy; he comes for everyone in the end, as far as I can see.)

But I keep building. I think: if I can get this ceiling finished, and those windows into the wall so I have a good view out over the water, and finish the stairs, it will be very comfortable, and I will be able to start building the next level up, and I might even gain on the water, and put some distance between myself and it… I have heard of it being done, but I have never seen it. I do not really know.

The Tower reaches far down into the darkness, but we feel that we know so much about it because of the stories that we tell each other—about its great victories and heartbreaking defeats, its trials and torments, its secret places and great halls, its passages and doorways through which beauty has paraded, and horror stalked, through which song and blood have flowed. So have I heard…

I have also heard it said, by a man named Aeschylus, that long ages ago, we knew, each one of us, when the Enemy would come for us. But we all stood waist deep in the water then, and we built nothing, and knew nothing of a life above the water.

But the knowledge of the time when the Enemy would come was taken from us, and in return, we were given hope—hope that the Enemy might forget us; hope that if we work and build hard enough, we might rise above the water, out of the Enemy’s reach, away from the deathly chill of his grasp—and so today, there is always hope.

The Enemy came for a friend yesterday; he was one of the quiet ones, he went beneath the water quickly; it is almost as if the Enemy wants to be merciful about it sometimes.

But I do not really know; I have never seen it.

And now, there is building to do. Because everywhere, there is water.

... from
The Secret Weapon

There was once a girl — excuse me, a young woman, you decide — who on account of having no excuse at all for an episode of bad behaviour, bad language, and bad attitude, was sent to her room. Not
straight
to her room, which is to say, without dinner, because none of the behaviour, language, or attitude were irredeemably atrocious or outrageous — but the whole package, considered together, was of the type about which grown-ups eventually — and quite rightfully — come to the conclusion that they have had enough.

And this was behaviour which really could not be ignored; there would be a cleaning bill to countenance, and apologies to make, and eyes to roll during the retelling, and so the girl was given over to the servants and, before the jugglers and the clowns and the singers, and even the dancing Syrians (who said they were Sufis, but who could be sure?), had begun, before in fact,
any
of the King’s birthday celebrations had begun — as soon as the fruit pureed with ice from the peaks of the Urals and dusted with honeyed pollen brushed from the wings of Baalbek doves had been served — yes, dinner having been done, the miscreant was sent to her room.

Now, you are curious as to the nature of the trouble, I know. I can hear your restlessness from here; it reminds me of the way the archers from the palace guard grumble as they practice in the courtyard early on a cold morning, far below my window. But I am not going to tell you; not because I don’t want to, particularly — you see, I have no agenda and can be trusted implicitly — but because she and I, we have made a deal, and a good deal it is; in exchange for my silence on certain matters, and the reasons for the transgressions of the evening in question are the least of them (and I must admit that too much education of some people can be just as injurious as too little or none at all; so I am being careful about what I tell you — but please don’t take offence; I mean none of this personally) — I have been told that I can tell you the following.

* *

The next day, she sought me out, while the mead hall was being returned to its normal immaculate state after the King’s birthday celebrations, which had apparently gone on all night, and were fit to keep even the monsters in their lairs on the marshes awake and grumbling — but let us not get started on monsters, for if we do that, we shall be here indefinitely...

The child (and I persist in thinking of her as a child; I think because of my own age, and the difference between us, rather than just her youth, which in itself is just a thing, and of no great importance; and also because if my own daughter had lived, she would be of the same order of age as the Princess; perhaps that has something to do with it, as well…) …the child, as I say… pressed upon me that I should put down my bucket and mop and follow her, so I did, because of course you do not refuse the Princess, none of us would ever think of it, and so I followed the Princess, and she led me — and do I need to describe my consternation, the ice which wrapped itself around my heart, the tightening of my lips, so that for several moments no words could part them, when I saw that she had led me to the door, heavy with chains and locks, shut fast with dire warnings and old rumours, sealed with whispers and averted eyes — you know of course, which door; I refer to
that
door, huge and unused for so long — she had led me to the room that had been sealed for as many years as the Princess is old (and you shall see how that works).

The tapestry that had concealed it since the day of the young Princess’s arrival lay in a convulsed pile on the floor where she had dropped it sometime during the night, when she should have been sleeping, and the guard outside her room should not; a mountain and attending foothills of brocaded skies and forest, and nymphs and satyrs, and a huge naked Artemis, lying sprawled and wanton across the floor.

‘I would have that door opened,’ said the Princess, turning to me rather than anyone else, her head held straight and her gaze more clear than that of anyone who had attended the King’s celebrations — and addressing me rather than anyone else. Of course. I always seem to get these jobs.

Now, please be patient; I need to digress. I have erred. With my mention of King’s birthdays, and jugglers, and being sent to rooms, and the dinner being exotic — Baalbek doves,
really
… — I think that quite possibly I have created in your mind a picture, part of which is the King as a sort of avuncular character, perhaps with a jolly smile, rosy cheeks, a happy and knowing twinkle in his eye — think of Saint Nicholas if you must; — and perhaps a Queen beside him, beautiful and wise and radiant, a good mother to the royal household and the realm; and you probably had thought, if you dwelt on the matter at all, that you have not met these two yet simply because I have yet to introduce you.

And you may have an image in your mind of the young Princess as being a very young child, of maybe ten or eleven, which of course is the age at which all children are precocious and heartless, and I
did
mention some bad behaviour, after all, and young girls combine these traits with a terrible lack of mercy, as thoroughly and as skilfully as the cooks in hell’s kitchens, where of course the meal and the diner are often one and the same; a condition well-known to all parents.

Oh my, is that what you were thinking? We
have
gone a little distance down the wrong track, haven’t we. Children do that to us, don’t they? One minute we’re sure of what we know, and then just one child, one sweet Princess later, we find, out of nowhere, a shock, like stepping into autumn leaves and finding a drain or a gutter lurking beneath, and there goes your ankle; or having killed the dragon and taken the treasure, slipping on the blood-slippery stone at the entrance of the creature’s lair, because you were not watching your step, and were thinking ahead too hard, too far, already dividing the jewels and gold and pearls between the members of your family, and so you slipped on the shed life blood of the dead monster (perhaps you were distracted by the mournful cry of its mother, perhaps the revenge that she swore to the heavens, causing the sea to boil, made you blanch a little, and miss your step…), and you lost your grip on the jewellery, the gold, the pearls, because you had to reach out, in a panic, and take hold of something, anything — a handhold of rock, or the branch of a blackened, scorched tree — to stop you and your armour and your horse and your servants and your supply wagons and your guards all from crashing, head over heel, one over the other, over and over, around and round, down over the precipice, into the abyss over which the dragon had kept guard, keeping the foolish and unwise away, so they should not dash their brains out on the rocks — and so you could do nothing but watch, your balance recovered but still precarious, as the treasure tumbled into the depths, and crashed to the bottom of the very pit from which the monster had first retrieved it; but as I said — or did I? — if you had not been distracted by the treasure, you would not have lost the treasure —

Hmm. Perhaps this is what tales of young royals do. Yes, I have digressed, and more than I intended to.

In short — yes, you see, I
can
do it, I
can
be brief — the Princess is: reserved, aloof, often withdrawn, introspective, frequently accused of rudeness or surliness, attractive, wide-eyed, not given to suffering fools, well-read, sometimes irascible (though never without cause), seventeen, raven-haired, intelligent (although so uninterested in the astrolabe that she has never touched one), given to gazing at the moon and composing verse which she never writes down, and of course she is not the natural daughter of the King or Queen, and therefore lacks both the King’s raptorial nature and the Queen’s proclivity for screaming at anything or anyone, regardless of their distance from her, or their degree of fault in the matter at hand;

— and here is the King of Norway — he is short, and I don’t need to tell you, of all people, how little is the trust that should be placed in short men, because they hate the world so much on account of its ruthlessness and its enjoyment in seeing them cuckolded; and he is thin, and you must never trust those who are thin, because they are always hungry; and he is old, and so many of the old care about all the wrong things, or nothing — or even worse, about nothing so much as soft food.

The King is harsh, and careless, and cruel. Yet do not think that he is unfeeling; for he feels everything, and he finds much relief and satisfaction in the pain of those he delivers it to;

— and now you’re wondering how the Queen fits in.

She fits in like this: where he is short, she is not (she towers above him); where he speaks but little, she is an endless torrent of words; where he is cruel — well, she
is
that. The King loves the Queen — well, to the degree and in the manner that he does — simply because he cannot cause her pain, and this impresses him greatly; in fact the delirium of it often deprives him of sleep. She is impervious to him. Between them, in public as well as in private, they have established this beyond all doubt, with a certainty and thoroughness that would cause some to descend to the outer regions of madness. (Their relationship is not alone in this; but it is a good example of it.)

The King and the Queen preside over their realm as though no one else could possibly do it, or has ever done it before them. Only the mountains and the rocks and trees and the rivers and lakes, and the winds that hunt and race above it all, and the hamadryads that live in all of it, can remember the time when the King’s predecessor sat on the throne — but he was a fool, and quick enough about sliding to his death along the blade of a dagger; and so they keep their silence, because for everything that exists, there is something for which a dagger can serve as a metaphor, along the blade of which glistens doom and dissolution.

Now in the days surrounding these events, the realm has come to resemble the Royal Couple; Norway has taken after them, just as any child will its parents eventually, through either imitation or resentment. (The effect, though often understandably unpopular, is inescapable and inevitable.)