Theatre of the Gods (49 page)

It was almost four hours into his meditations when he looked up to discover a boy at his table. And what a face this boy had, such a face you’ve never seen. When the old man addressed him he raised a pair of glassy eyes. It was as if he did not even remember sitting at the old man’s table just a few seconds ago.

‘I’m becoming sadder by the hour. I no longer sleep. I feel like my spirit is being drained from me. I lose whole days. Where do they go? I can’t tell you.’

This tavern did not have jasmine tea. Fabrigas took a pot of gingered beer and listened to the boy as he talked endlessly. It was necessary, he thought, with all this boy had been through, with all he’d seen, to be constantly in motion. A person might describe this feeling as ‘wanderlust’ – if that person was an idiot. Wanderlust is the feeling that if you don’t take a trip you might start knocking people’s hats off. What this boy had was the feeling that if he didn’t move soon, he would die.

‘Everyone is very worried about you. We are like a family now.’

‘Don’t talk to me about family. You abandoned me. You gave me poison soup. You were going to leave me in space.’

‘I know. There are some things I need to work on.’

‘There is barely any love in the universe. And where there is it is an evil magic. It is a superstition of the heart, yes? You told me this. So don’t talk to me about family. You abandoned me and you’ll do it again. That botanist does not care about anyone but herself. The girl is a monster. Everyone else is gone. Even the man who swore to hang me has abandoned me.’ He laughed. ‘But it’s not the first time he’s done that. I forgive him. I forgive him for everything. Let’s drink some more and forget. Let’s let the booze delight our minds with forgetfulness. Let’s become like old men.’

‘It won’t be long, boy. They’ll give us a ship. And then we’ll find the boy.’

‘That boy! What’s his name?’

‘Roberto?’

‘Yes! The crazy boy. Whatever happened to him?’

‘… If you remember … he vanished with our ship.’

‘Why are we waiting here, then? This city is eating our days. It is stealing our minds!’

‘For now, we have no choice. We must be patient. The Emperor is attempting to arrange a ship for us. We could try another meeting.’

‘No more meetings! He is Emperor, he should be able to conjure a ship like this!’ He tried to snap his fingers. He could not snap his fingers.

Fabrigas went back to the others and expressed concern. ‘A boy like that can’t stay still for long. A boy like that needs to stay in motion or he’ll drown in his own black waters. A boy like that is like a shark!’

‘Yes,’ said Fritzacopple, ‘a shark.’ The others nodded, then returned to their activities.

Late at night, when the innkeeper finally kicked him out, the shark would drift back home through the halls and outer palaces, dunking his head in the fountains and snorting at the ostentatious royal portraits that hung along the marble warrens. Tonight was particularly quiet; his boot-falls boomed along the passages, and the warm air swooned and wobbled. There was one painting he always stopped to see and never snorted at. She stood in leaves, a white gown falling over her like seawater. Behind her was a forest; blood-red limbs enfolded her. She seemed to be about to step from the frame into the real world, but also to be retreating, falling away. The strangest thing about the painting was that every time he looked at it he saw something new. Last night he’d noticed that on the lake in the distance was a small rowing boat with a man in it. His face was just a smear of paint. Tonight he noticed a second man, a twin; he held a knife to the first man’s throat. Captain Lambestyo felt a predatory breath upon his neck, then looked round to find nothing.

What preys upon a shark? That is an excellent question. You really do ask very good questions.

SOUND AND VISION

A week became two, then three. Strange and awful things had begun to happen in the city of Diemendääs. Or perhaps that should be
stranger
and
awfuller.
As if the mysterious self-killings had not been enough to keep the populace terrified, the remains of a palace guardsman – half eaten, as if by a beast – were found in one of the courtyards. People reported bizarre distortions of their familiar realities: doors that appeared from nowhere, that opened into forests, or caves, or other people’s living rooms. One night it rained green crickets, and someone even reported seeing a large, shaggy creature with a pretty muzzle. The city’s Secret Police had finally acknowledged the fact that malevolent forces were involved in the recent self-killings, self-mutilations and auto-decapitations which had scythed through the city’s wealthy classes, and they decreed that until the killer was caught, every citizen should be home by a certain hour.

There was still no sign of their old ship, or word of a new one from the Emperor. Fabrigas took an apartment overlooking the river and began to fill it with books and things as if he never planned to leave. The city’s great minds arrived like moths, drawn to the light and heat of scientific speculation. They spent the nights sucking coffee through their teeth and flitting from one grand subject to another.

When Fabrigas wasn’t holding court at his bachelor pad he could be found in Dray’s laboratory. Lenore had started coming along too, since Miss Fritzacopple had begun to exclude her from her field trips
with the Emperor. ‘It is far too dangerous now to take the children to public places.’ The Emperor agreed.

‘Running across the place with the older man of marriage,’ said Lenore. ‘Is that how the woman behaves?’

The two men ignored her. ‘My experiments have determined that the membrane between our universe and the Forbidden Zone has weakened significantly,’ said Dray. ‘That might explain why you cherubs were able to enter the zone without any advanced equipment. Very troubling, tortoise, yes. We can’t just have any old thing entering the zone.’

Fabrigas nodded gravely.

‘And look what I found when I checked my equipment today: another starfish!’

Dray handed Fabrigas another silvery star. ‘Well I never.’ The old man held the creature up to the light and examined the fine old markings on its surface.

‘Anyhow, we’d better get you kittens home, the curfew is nearly here!’ He reached for his coat.

‘What in the black hole sun is that?!’ Fabrigas exclaimed. He had a bony finger pointed at a large gun on a wooden tripod pointing at a black cloth screen.

‘Oh, now that
is
special,’ said Dray as he hung his coat on a chair again. He had been trying for more than an hour to get his visitors out the door. ‘That’s a new remote viewing system I’ve pioneered.’ He pulled a switch and a set of lamps came on with a heavy
chank
, throwing the room into brightness. ‘This machine here,’ he said, patting the gun instrument, ‘is an image-capturing device. Keep your eye on that vision unit.’ Fabrigas peered at the glass-fronted wooden box. It was black and empty behind the glass, yet when Dr Dray walked in front of the capture gun he appeared instantly behind the glass, a tiny version of himself, waving.

‘Sweet-smelling stars above!’ the old man shouted. ‘You’re in two places at once!’

‘Don’t be silly, chook,’ said Dray. ‘That’s only a facsimile image of me in the box. My image can be transmitted to another location, or recorded for later.’

‘How does it work? Magnetically charged ethers?’

Dray snorted. ‘This invention is going to revolutionise the way we communicate. No more telegraphic messages, no more hyper-space pigeons, just instant audio-visual contact.’

‘Audio-visual,’ whispered Fabrigas breathlessly, and he reached out to tap his finger on the glass screen.

‘We’re putting those boxes into thirty thousand homes across the city, duckling. Think of the possibilities. The Emperor will be able to personally address his people. We can stage dramas and readings for the citizenry. It will be useful to have something to help people forget about all this “end-time” nonsense. Soon, everyone in the universe will be talking about Omnivision™.’

‘Omnivision™,’ whispered Fabrigas.

‘I’m right now getting it ready for a trial run at the Ring of Iron next week. Tell you what, sugar-pips, why don’t you perform a dramatic reading from your journals – as a warm-up act?’

‘I am not much of an orator,’ said Fabrigas, ‘and it’s unlikely we’ll be around for much longer. As you know we have a rather pressing mission.’

‘Ah yes, the girl. Astonishing specimen. Potentially quite dangerous.’

‘I’m right here in the room,’ said the girl.

‘So you are.’

*

It only took a few more minutes to persuade Fabrigas to appear on Dr Dray’s Omnivision™ to perform a dramatic reading of their plight at the hands of the cannibal cult.

‘Thom! The drum sounded. The Marshians raised their blades. Bright they gleamed and silvery as a moon’s dreadful edge, despite
the greenish sickly light. How bright the single star that hung upon their deadly tips. How dread the
thom!
which rang twelve times the dismal hour of our deaths!’

As you can well see, the old man has an artful prose style. Though, in my opinion, a tad overcooked. But the whole city tuned in to watch his reading. Those who didn’t yet have Omnivision™ sets crowded into neighbours’ houses, and thousands packed theatres whose proscenium stages had been adapted to support screens. Our friends watched from the Emperor’s own private viewing room and were amazed. Even the Emperor seemed to enjoy himself. In fact, they had all noticed a remarkable transformation in the man during the time he’d spent with the children and their attendant botanist.

Fabrigas capped off his appearance with a short magic show, even persuading Miss Fritzacopple to be his beautiful assistant. (And she was a particularly beautiful assistant, people remarked.) He performed, for the people of Diemendääs, feats of showmanship, suggestion and misdirection. He performed the trick of vanishing, the trick of levitation and, most dramatically, the trick of pretending to stab Miss Fritzacopple through the heart with a real dagger.

‘But how do you know that you’ve pulled the trick dagger from your robe?’ his very lovely assistant asked later.

‘Trick dagger? My dear, there’s no “trick dagger”.’

The botanist was aghast.

Fabrigas became an instant celebrity. He couldn’t walk the streets without being mobbed by autograph hunters, a problem he solved by taking his morning walks while waving his cane in front of him and yelling, ‘Get back! Get back!’ But he seemed to be secretly enjoying himself.

‘What is happening to us?’ said Lenore. ‘It seems as if everyone is breaking apart. Did we not have a mission? Are we not supposed to be finding our ship, finding Roberto?’

‘Are we not indeed,’ said Fritzacopple, from somewhere far away.

*

Prince Panduke showed Kimmy his owls. He even let her name one of the chicks. She named him Vince. Then Panduke snuck her in to see his iron man. It was a great automaton, a hundred feet high, with hands that could bend steel. The machine had been unearthed, along with many other strange artefacts, during the first excavations of the mountains centuries ago. It belonged to a culture long forgotten. Dr Dray had found him gathering dust in an old warehouse and had fixed him up for employment as an industrial tool, but the machine – which could snap a steel beam like a toothpick between its thumb and forefinger – had been deemed too dangerous for public use, and so he was given to the prince as a birthday gift – with strict instructions that he was not to touch him until his eighteenth birthday. And so the giant was left asleep in his hangar.

‘What good is a birthday gift that can’t be used until another birthday?’

‘He certainly is handsome,’ said Kimmy. ‘Tall, too.’

‘I can show you where the keys are hidden if you like,’ said the prince.

*

These were the days of their lives: all missions set aside for lazy, civilised fun, for museum trips and magic shows. Throughout this whole time, throughout the many days of the Festival of the Dead, the Empress – the supposedly most beautiful woman in the universe, the woman whose face launched a hundred thousand ships, some tanks and an array of siege machines – was never seen in public. She remained the shadow of a rumour, passing from lip to lip in darkened cafes, as frail and weary as huffed smoke.

And then she made an announcement which turned the city upside down.

THE RING OF IRON

Every year, at the height of the Festival of the Dead, at the darkest hour, in the dimmest place, Diemendääs commemorated the glory of the fallen with a cage-combat event called the Ring of Iron. All around the city fireworks flared, ship bells rang mournfully, airships trailed banners a mile long.

Fritzacopple had decided that the captain would enter the Ring of Iron. ‘It will be good for you,’ she said. ‘Put some fire back in your belly.

‘I don’t need fire in my belly. If you don’t leave me alone I’ll set a fire in your hair.’

But she put his name on the register anyway. Every year the Empress would choose her own champion, someone who would battle on her behalf. It was the highest honour, and the winner of the event would receive the keys to the city, and a ball in their honour the following evening. So the city was sent into a lipothymy when the Empress announced that her champion for this year would be a foreigner, one Captain Carlos Góngora Lambestyo. The captain was sleeping off a hard night and had to be woken. He angrily told the servants to leave him alone – one got a blackened eye – but when he was informed that to be chosen was the highest honour possible, and that refusal would most likely lead to his execution, he reluctantly agreed.

Lenore was furious. ‘So this is her game. She takes
my
captain and makes him the champion of her. She knows that I have fondnesses.
Well, if she wishes to play this game then I am ready to play. Yes.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ drawled Fritzacopple. ‘Frankly, dear, you are not nearly old enough to have “fondnesses”, or play games, and you are
definitely
not old enough to play games of fondness with the likes of him.’