The Promise of the Child (7 page)

Impatiens saw him and raised a hand. He, Drimys and Briza were further down the beach towards the caves, where the pebbles became coarse brown sand. No one was coloured this morning, their bodies blazing red against the beach. Dozens of sticks had been planted in the sand for some sort of game but now stood forgotten. Instead they were building a large sandcastle, which to Lycaste looked rather like an unfinished model of his own house.

As he left the grass it returned, that feeling of being observed. There was someone watching him, he was almost certain of it now. He scanned the orchard, the hills, his tallest tower. He put a hand to his glistening brow and surveyed the patches of shade between the wild palms in the distance, seeing nothing but blackness among their messy, dried tangle. Had the watcher been there last night, marking him then? Lycaste rubbed at his neck self-consciously and trudged quickly down the slope of clattering pebbles towards the sand, keen to be hidden by the bank of grass that separated the orchard from the beach.

Impatiens walked up to meet him, breakfast still clinging to his beard. “Can we have a look at that boat, Lycaste?”

He had begun to hope his friend would have forgotten about the whole thing. He pointed to the caves, where a small, upturned boat lay in shadow at the edge of the rock. “It's down there, though don't get your hopes up—it's probably not seaworthy any more.”

They walked to the shade of the cave and looked down at the boat. Its bowl-like hull, notched along its middle with a smooth, straight groove, was almost perfectly hemispherical, somehow able to repel the water as it slid forwards, like a magnet thrust towards its twin. Lycaste had only recently begun to wonder how it worked, that water-repulsing material; it felt like plastic but surely could not have been. A few years ago he'd painted it a jolly lemon yellow and it was badly in need of another coat. He eyed it critically while Impatiens went to the far side. The boat looked so small now; the thought of what they were planning to do with it felt ridiculous. They heaved it over and pushed it towards the waterline, displacing a dazed and seething profusion of black crabs.

“It won't fit more than three,” said Lycaste as they entered the water, its surface parting and struggling away from the front of the craft to leave a clearly visible air gap between the hull and the green swell.

Impatiens nodded and continued wading. “You, me and Drimys.” They were now waist-deep in the lime waves, guiding the sides of the boat as it rose gently with each sucking swell. Lycaste was ready to hop in, imagining the beast as he vaguely remembered it—a creamy white streak, a distant ragged fin. Impatiens strode on, churning the sand around his calves into a tropical murk.

“What does a chief armourer do, exactly?” Lycaste asked.

“Chief armourer fires the harpoon.”

He quickly pulled himself aboard as the waves breached his chest, considering the idea for a moment and finding that he was excited despite himself. He reached over the edge to help Impatiens in and they sat watching the cove glide by, his boat manoeuvring through its own vacuum by the softest pressure of a hand laid upon its stern. The rocks were in shadow, the tall caves set within them drained by the morning low tide. The two friends had explored most of them over the years, walking miles along the coast and naming them like pioneers; Lycaste always deferred and let Impatiens decide, it was his friend's talent. Serious, rather unimaginative sorts of names were picked to begin with: Cape Lycaste, the Cove of Sorrows, Stinger Reef. Their final discovery, the novelty having worn off by then, had consisted of a tiny beach piled inexplicably with sun-bleached animal bones. They had named it Scary Bay and abandoned all further searches, vowing to each other that they would never go out that way again.

“Where are we heading?” Lycaste asked, feeling decidedly unsafe inside the small bowl.

“Anywhere. Over to the next bay. Come on, Lycaste—show me how fast it goes.”

“You know how fast it goes.” He knelt and leaned on the stern, gradually tipping the half-sphere until its rim almost touched the gliding surface of the sea. The waves flew apart at the boat's approach, the warm wind drumming faster in their ears. He heard Impatiens laughing distantly. Lycaste ground the heel of his palm to the right, carving a white tide of repulsed water, and swung them back towards the shore, now far-off.

“Let's have a go.” Impatiens slapped his hand on the stern before Lycaste could answer, rocking the boat away from the shore again and raising another plume of spray. He leaned with all his weight and they raced out into the open sea, Lycaste anxiously watching the beach recede through the strands of his wind-blown hair.

The rich green waves began to slop more forcibly, repulsed from the hull in a roiling, slapping current and broad, foam-crested wings. Impatiens eased the pressure and they slowed, silence flooding back as the water calmed around them. Lycaste looked down into the clear sea; it was very deep now. Schools of dark fish swam far below, broken by shimmering refraction. Anything could glide eerie and unnoticed beneath them. He glanced over at Impatiens, who was also staring rapt into the depths, sparkling reflections playing on his face. A hot breeze tousled his long blond hair across his eyes, breaking the spell, and he sat back, thinking.

“We'll need bait.”

Lycaste wondered for a moment what might attract the creatures they wanted to find. “I have a crop of bloodfruit from last year.”

“Fermented?”

“Some of it.”

From time to time in the hottest months, his flesh trees ran with sticky red sap. This unsettling phenomenon usually meant they were overripe; the fruit Lycaste was thinking of would be perfect. Their flavour even had a little kick to it. He nudged the edge of the boat deliberately with his toe and it began to move, turning parallel to the far-off beach.

“Has anyone ever been eaten?” he asked after some time, rather hoping Impatiens wouldn't hear his question.

Impatiens laughed, nodding enthusiastically.

He hesitated. “Who?”

“It was a woman, I think. Her name escapes me—it was a very long time ago, though, Lycaste.”

Lycaste nodded, shading his eyes and peering back to shore, clearly marking the two red shapes as they played in the sand. The hills bore down lushly above them, wobbling in the rising heat. He could make out single browning palms standing lonely on the slopes.

Lycaste thought again of his observer. Someone was up there.

“Have you seen anyone new around lately? In the Province?”

Impatiens turned and stared at him, uncomprehending. “Someone we don't know, you mean?”

“Yes.”

His friend picked some bright yellow paint from the side of the boat, thinking. “I went to see Elcholtzia three days ago. He would have mentioned someone—you know what a chatterbox he is. Why do you ask?”

Lycaste bit his lip, feeling slightly foolish. “I don't know, I thought I might have seen a new person,” he said, hoping the small lie would validate his fears.

“Where?”

“It doesn't matter, it was probably just one of you walking about.” He wanted to change the subject now he'd gone too far, but Impatiens leaned forward, interested. New people didn't turn up very often.

“What did they look like?”

“I don't know. I'm fairly sure it was one of you now, thinking about it,” he said quickly, looking away.

Impatiens sat back, disappointed. He stared down into the depths again as they sailed back to shore and began to trail his hand in the water, as if daring something to come. He gradually sank it lower and lower, entranced by the sea-floor below them. Finally he looked up and lifted his arm out. “Let's go for a walk later, up into the hills. You can ask Elcholtzia about your stranger.”

When they landed at the beach, Drimys was stretched out, asleep. Briza had covered about half of his father's body with sand but tired of the game when he'd got no reaction. The sandcastle was finished and Lycaste strolled up to it, wondering if it was indeed meant to be his house. The five towers were there, the central one a little taller than the others. He wandered around to the front where he could see the gaping entrance, part of which had caved in since it had been dug. Lycaste sat down next to it and patted the entrance back into place, but it fell in again as soon as he took his hand away. The sun had dried it out, he saw: running his hand along the top of the mound, the powdery outer layer of sand swept away in his palm. Maybe this was what would happen to his own home, in time.

He looked up the long strip of beach, speckled brown against electric jade, wondering what it would all look like in a thousand years. Would his house that he loved so much even be here any more? Perhaps some enterprising person would have built something else on top of it all, after Lycaste was long dead and with no sons or daughters to inherit what once was his. He smoothed his hand over the hump again, scouring away the dry sand, and clambered up stiffly. It was because of the things she'd told him, this new fascination, this new fear. He'd never heard of anything quite like the idea of ghosts until Pentas brought it up one evening, an age-old belief from the Seventh Province. The Seventh was a far-flung place to someone with such limited knowledge of life as Lycaste; he thought the people there must be very strange indeed to have come up with such things.

Ghost.
He played with the word quietly on his tongue, looking out across the beach to the caves.

This had been his uncle's land, once. Only upon his death had Lycaste been permitted to visit and claim what had been left to him, the sole child born to the family for two centuries. Trollius, who had once owned the very sand between Lycaste's fingers, had never been kind to his nephew on the rare occasions when they had met, boisterous and unfeeling in the presence of Lycaste's timidity. He remembered a strong mutual dislike between them.

Disappointing to his uncle as he was, Lycaste was the only heir; the estate was his at twenty-five to do with as he pleased. Despite his indifference to his relative's death, Lycaste fancied absurdly that they were closer now than they'd ever been. Trollius had lived in the house by the beach for more than a hundred years, and although Lycaste found it hard to imagine the rancid old man appreciating anything, he must surely have enjoyed the very things that Lycaste found so continually breathtaking. Sometimes Lycaste would sit at his favourite spot, beneath the tall windows of the third tower, its vista encompassing the sea and the hills as well as the far-off blue haze northwards. Not even the highest tower could show you all that, its own view obscured by its position between the other four outposts. In the evening, the sun's rays slanted crimson into that top room as the flowers wailed, and he wondered if his uncle in all his years had ever felt the same peace and contentment as Lycaste did, sitting quietly and alone in that airy chamber.

Sometimes, after the westerly sunset was nothing but a slit of neon in the lambent blue, he slept up there, hidden in his nest above the world, closing and locking the heavy antique door so as not to be disturbed. They were arms, his towers, arms that swept him up and carried him to safety from the noise and the questions and the demands. They suited his own hermitic temperament elegantly, but perhaps his uncle had never bothered much with them. Too many flights of stairs, perhaps; he had hated stairs. If Trollius's ghost still lived here—he imagined his uncle's spirit shaded blue, like the sky—then Lycaste would be safest at the top of some stairs.

They met where the path forked about half a mile from Lycaste's home, climbing into the low hills away from the sea. The dusty track was more like a parting in the grasses, weaving in and out of the dense shade of the trees. Followed for long enough, it would take them out of Lycaste's estate and through a number of others, eventually joining a rocky causeway and leaving the Province entirely.

“I saw Pentas last night, you know,” said Impatiens after their conversation had lapsed sufficiently. “After I came home from your dinner.”

Lycaste listened to the pause, hearing the thick buzz of cicadas all around them. “How was she?” he asked at last.

“I cannot understand,” his friend replied after a moment's thought, “just why you have fallen in love with that girl—of all the people you might have chosen. She really is nothing remarkable—I hope you don't mind my saying so.” He looked up from the ground at Lycaste. “Her older sister, on the other hand, strikes me as a much finer catch.”

“Eranthis?” Lycaste smiled sheepishly. “You think—?”

Impatiens laughed, a harsh bark that startled the cicadas. “Not a chance, dear fellow. She's known you quite long enough to have seen through the mystery by now, I'm afraid.”

He glanced down again, feeling foolish for playing into Impatiens's little joke. “I know you think I don't understand what love means, but I know what I feel, Impatiens.”

The older man's face softened. “I'm sure you do. Make yourself better for it, Lycaste, and choose another. It's not as if you're short on offers.”

Again the same advice, as if everyone but him knew for certain how Pentas felt.

“So many people make such long journeys to come here, to the Tenth, to seek my betrothal …” Lycaste smiled apologetically, trying to find the right words. “But there's only one person I want. Can't they see I'm not about to change my mind?”

“You had better, for all our sakes,” sighed Impatiens. “Now stop
dwelling
on it, handsome fool—you'll give yourself a headache.”

The sun beat the backs of their ruddy necks as they reached the top of the first hill, stopping in the shadow of a copse of thin palms to look back at the view. The cove was partially hidden—only its encircling arms of rock visible beyond the hazy white towers of the house. Lycaste sat looking down into his gardens, thinking of how everyone called him handsome or beautiful to cheer him up, and how it had only just begun to feel like praise after all.