The Secret Book of Paradys (106 page)

And the warders were full of spirits.

They brought Citalbo, the poet who had gone mad.

He stood on the stage, and spoke to Johanos Martin in a sonorous voice of leaden silver.

“Why,” said Roche, startled, “he’s saying your lines from the play – the Roman –”

“He speaks very well,” said Martin, and gazed up the short distance at Citalbo.

“Empires shall go down like suns,” Citalbo said. “And ships beach in the bays as locusts do, on the firm corn.”

He inclined his head, and waited courteously.

Johanos Martin laughed. He got up, and said, ringingly and perfectly, “So it was, and so it shall be always,” and paused like a coquette.

And Citalbo went on: “Until the earth is a dry husk and the sky falls, and in never any house –”

“A girl sits,” Martin said, “to braid her hair. Or a warrior stands –”

“To buckle on the brass of war. But then,” Citalbo said, “we shall be dust, and thus –”

“Who cares for those that do not think of us?” Martin finished.

Roche applauded. The other actors and actresses were caught up, and put their gloved and bead-garlanded paws together.

“Monsieur,” said Martin, for Citalbo had dared to speak his lines with great beauty and skill, “as I am, you are: an actor.”

“Then you, sir,” replied Citalbo, softly, carryingly, “must be as I am. Mad.”

Martin’s face closed. His eyes were steel. He drained his glass, and turned away as Maque and the others had not been able to.

“Let’s leave. We’ve seen enough.”

“Oh,” said one of the actresses, with whom once Martin had made unsatisfactory love, “his lordship is suddenly squeamish.”

“Not at all. I consider you. The sun can be harsh on the complexion at your age, Susine.”

Dismayed, Dr. Volpe had stepped about his room. His books gleamed and he read their titles, remembering
I have this, and this
. He examined eggs and ornaments (
and this
). Across the blocks of the asylum things went on, but he might pretend they did not. This was his apartment, his country retreat. The palm in the window, the autumn woods.

He went to the case where the new butterfly was displayed, and stopped – in revulsion, distress.

The pinned specimen, which had been like flame and night, was crumbling. Its wings were showering off in soot and embers. Its body had twisted as if tortured, into a corkscrew.

When they brought Hilde from the tiny box where they had locked her, the “coffin,” her head was shaven like a bronze ball. She was shut now into a straitjacket, a mad-shirt, her arms secured across her body. One of her shoes had been subtracted.

They put her in the straw. She could barely move.

The women came.

As animals softly nose at each other in the winter fields, just so they approached, not actually touching, but mute, reserved, at one. They knew her. She was themselves.

And then Judit was there, and sat by Hilde.

Judit spoke of the land of snow, where the lovely fruit grew and the dawn-and-sunset sun poured out its jasper radiance. Birds sang and far off the sea glistened, waters that were not cold and into which the wine streams cascaded.

Hilde listened.

When Judit ceased, she said, “Judit, I’m dying.”

“No, poor child. You must simply endure.”

“But I am. You see, my blood’s turned to water.”

Judit stroked Hilde’s face. “Why do you think so?”

“Because my time hasn’t come. Not for weeks.”

“Your time? Oh. The female cycle … Once, I too.” Judit frowned. “My womb’s burned out. Yours also? Be thankful. They shame us here, when we bleed.”

Hilde bowed her head. “Then this is good?”

“Oh, yes,” said Judit strongly. “Be glad, dear.”

Months had passed, but Paradise had no seasons, as it had no sun, no moon.

They had killed with cords, but then came poisons. This often called for a particularly intimate attack – besides, they tried to find new types of bane. It taxed their ingenuity, and this time Felion and Smara put off the task. They did not poison anyone. They told each other, when they met, of their oppression at shirking the labor. Both had come close to it. Smara had even lured a man to her apartment, meaning to put some of the acid from the clockwork cat’s leaking panel into a glass of wine. But then she had not done it. The man had left resentfully; obviously he had expected something. “He may only have anticipated sex,” Felion told her.

They did not talk about the labyrinth, or the City beyond.

The mystery was like an ache that never went away.

Smara dreamed that she was moving through a pale warm building. An elderly woman in white was hurrying down a corridor, and when she passed Smara, the woman said, “Go away, Lucie. Go to your nurse.”

There was a long room that gave on a flagged patio, and here some men sat at ease, drinking tea. They did not seem to see Smara, who prowled about them, half wondering if she might drop poison in their cups. One man smoked a pipe and another toyed with an eye glass. They were elegant, and one very handsome, with longish silken hair. Smara took a fruit or vegetable from a bowl on a table. She threw it past them, out onto the lawn. There it rolled like an orange snowball, away and away, until it hit a low fence in the distance.

Smara did not tell Felion about this dream, in which there had been clarity, daylight, and no mist.

Felion did not dream about the other City, or its environs.

They walked the broad fogbound boulevards, that sometimes echoed at their voices or rang with unknown laughter.

One afternoon, they came, seemingly by chance, to the foot of the hundred steps.

They stood for some time, as if awaiting another person.

Then, in fits and starts, frequently stopping to stare away across the blank of Paradise (the cathedral tower was invisible today), they climbed the steps.

On the Bird Terrace they did not pause. Felion opened the door with the chant of numbers. They went into the house, through, and down.

In the basement a small machine had woken and was bustling about, moving little metal boxes, cogs, and bunches or wire from one place to another, apparently without logic.

As they walked along the track, it skittered after them, then veered away, twittering angrily.

“It believes we’re intruders,” he said.

“Are we?”

“Yes, but we were meant to be.”

Then the ice wall was ahead of them.

Felion picked up the torch he had left lying, and lit it.

“We can run through,” he said. “Keep hold of my hand or we may be separated again.”

“I’m not afraid,” she said. “And that seems wrong.”

“They’ve done something to the door of the artist’s house,” he said. “That may make it difficult to leave the premises. We must break through
outside
the house. You must
will
that, too.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Demand it then, aloud, of the labyrinth. How else did you get in and out before?”

“It seemed … easy,” she said.

“It is easy. Yes,” he added, “of course, it must all be wrong. The heat of the torch will finally spoil the ice – what then? We have to decide, Smara, where we want to be.”

In the labyrinth they did not run, but walked briskly, she striding and he slightly checking his pace, to stay in step with each other.

A glowing thing bloomed in the wall.

“Look!” she said.

He saw it too, presumably the same vision. A child watching a tiger in a cage. It was a horrible child, sneering at the incredible and flawless animal, which, if the bars had not been there, would have destroyed the child fastidiously and at once.

Then the image dispersed.

They had come suddenly into the oval heart of the labyrinth.

On the floor was a fruit, an orange fruit.

Felion let go of Smara’s hand, bent down, and picked the fruit up. But Smara was gazing at the bird-headed thing that had risen above out of the ice. If anything it was now more clear, more like the statues on her uncle’s terrace.

Felion tossed the orange fruit up at the ice statue. The fruit struck it a weightless blow and sailed on, and over into nothing, whence, surely, it had come.

“I’m not afraid of that now, either,” said Smara. “It’s only a shape.”

Felion took her by her hand again quickly.

“Let’s go on.”

A sound rose, the oceanic breathing roar of the labyrinth.

Smara moved reluctantly. “I thought it would crumble a little, when I said it didn’t frighten me.”

Beyond the heart, keeping to the left, they strode forward.

“Remember,” he said, “the
outside
of the woman’s house. The street there.”

“Are you still holding my hand?” she asked.

Felion hesitated, and as he did so, the torch flickered as if a wind rushed through the maze. And Smara slid away from him.

It was as though she were moved away on runners. She did not seem to notice. When he called out in alarm, she only nodded. “
Outside
the house,” she repeated.

And then she was furled aside into the ice wall.

Perhaps Felion had been pulled aside in this way as he followed his uncle, or the man who resembled his uncle, those months before when he had come back here alone.

Felion was appalled nevertheless. He tried to approach the wall, but it was solid, ungiving, and Smara had gone.

He had no choice, it seemed to him, but to proceed to the labyrinth’s extremity. Maybe, anyway, he would find her there.

When he reached the end of the tunnels, the torch was fluttering sickly. Ahead, in the opening, lay a cloudy void.

Felion spoke aloud to it, telling it harshly what he expected it to become, the street outside the artist’s house. But even when he walked right up to it, the exit from the labyrinth showed nothing but formless clouds, save far away, he seemed to glimpse a shape like a mountain.

“But it’s easy,” he said. He dropped the torch by the exit point, and plunged his hand and arm out into the cloudy aberration.

Perhaps the tiger’s cage was there, and his hand had gone in through the bars.

Felion drew his arm back. It was whole.

Then he shut his eyes, lowered his blond head, and jumped through the gap straight into the cloud.

Smara stood on the golden bank of a malt-dark river. She was not distressed. She had not been so before, when she had lost Felion and arrived in another world. Not to be distressed was possibly distressing.

And this was not the other City. Assuredly not.

The air had an exceptional brightness and lucidity. Distant mountains embraced the sky.

Below, on the honey strand, tigers and lions were feeding on something among the onyx boulders.

Above, a city did line the bank. High, white, pillared buildings, glistening with metal. Huge trees which might have been palms, but their fronds curved to the ground.

Around Smara was a garden, and everywhere in it girls in white were watering the flowers. Probably Smara had not been noticed for this reason, for in her hand was a bronze dipper filled by water. Smara went quietly up the slope of the turf and came out on a walk. On the horizon was a marble palace of extreme tallness. Nearby, a queen or empress was seated under a white sunshade. She was beautiful, more beautiful even than Smara’s mother. Around her throat was a rope made of twenty or so chains of enormous pearls. Her black hair fell from a starry coronet to her feet.

A man sat at her feet.

He was tanned almost to leather, and in his ears winked diamonds. He was telling the beautiful queen boldly about a voyage he had made in a timber ship. He showed her on a map that was stretched over the grass.

“But she ran aground, Majesty. We lost the strange fruit and the priceless glass vessels. I was there ten days, with my men, before the king of the land heard what had befallen us and sent his chariots to our assistance.”

“I have never known luck like yours,” said the queen. “Maque, you know you’re worth more to me than any cargo. But who,” she added, “is that girl, listening?”

“Your favorite handmaiden, surely.”

“No, she has hair like ginger spice. This one has hair like cream. Who are you, young girl?”

“Smara,” Smara said, and she bowed. But then the dipper spilled all over her skirt.

“She’s in search of some other country,” said the queen. “Be careful,” she added, “not all of them are good.”

“Madame,” said the sailor, who had been called Maque, “in a way, it’s true of us all – that we search for other countries. Of the mind, the heart, and the soul. And sometimes even we search for hell on earth.”

The queen smiled. She laid her hand on his arm. “Where are you going?” the queen asked Smara.

“To Felion, my brother.”

“Do you love him?” asked the queen.

“Yes.”

“Love can do anything,” said the queen.

Smara turned, and a cloud was there behind her. She dropped the dipper on the grass, and then –

And then it seemed she was her mother, falling, falling from the whirling tower, into the stony mist.