Thorn Boy and Other Dreams of Dark Desire (21 page)

In the evening
Jadrin led Ashalan into the gardens, saying, ‘The boy was found
here, among the roses...’

‘
How
cruel! He seems wise for his years, such knowing
eyes...’

‘
Yes. We
thought that too.’ A silence fell. They sat upon the grass, beneath
the boughs of a drooping salix tree.

Ashalan began
to speak of some of his experiences in the east. When he came to
the tale of the strange bridge-builder, Jadrin’s gaze became more
intense, his expression fixed and wondering. Ashalan laughed at the
end of the telling but Jadrin was silent. He stood up, his back to
the king, and stared hard into the trees behind them.

‘
What is
it?’ Ashalan asked.

Jadrin raised
an impatient hand. ‘I... don’t know. Only this. I should have
thought. I should have realised. It may not be important, I don’t
know.’

‘
What?
What?’

‘
The
child. I refused to have him named until you returned.’

‘
So? I
don’t understand what you’re trying to say.’

‘
Don’t
you see... the servants, they call him “Nothing”! You promised
nothing. Your son is nothing. Don’t you see?’

Ashalan was
quite stupified by Jadrin’s outburst. He uttered a small but
nervous laugh. ‘Jadrin, what you’re saying is ridiculous! How could
that stranger have known about your... adoption... when not even I
knew myself!’

‘
There
is more to it than you know, or could even guess.’ Jadrin punched
the air in frustration. ‘Goddess, I should have
realised!’

‘
This
means nothing to me!’ Ashalan said coldly. ‘Perhaps you’d better
explain.’

Jadrin opened
his mouth to say, ‘I can’t’ but a sudden and bitter wind swept the
words from his lips. His hair blew across his eyes and he heard
Ashalan swear in surprise. All the trees rustled furiously around
them. The air smelt of acrid smoke and stale flowers. ‘No,’ Jadrin
said.

‘
Such a
welcome!’ said a ringing hollow voice.

Ashalan turned
to follow the direction of Jadrin’s gaze and beheld the same
cloaked figure who he had encountered on the banks of the river
back east.

‘
Lord
Jadrin,’ the figure said in a silky voice, ‘would you give me any
less welcome than you gave the king when he returned? After all, I
granted you your heart’s desire.’

‘
Who is
this?’ Ashalan demanded, cold on the inside with a sick
dread.

‘
Tell
him, Jadrin,’ said the angel.

‘
It is
Lailahel, prince of conception,’ Jadrin replied.

‘
I have
come for my payment,’ said the angel.

‘
You
asked for none.’

‘
I asked
for nothing.’

Jadrin sighed
deeply. ‘It is plain to me what you really want. You tricked
me.’

Lailahel
laughed. ‘Nothing is a magical child, Jadrin. More my son than
yours. Both of you promised him to me; you can’t deny that. He does
not belong with you and your kind.’

‘
Very
well.’ Jadrin took a deep breath. ‘Tomorrow. Give us until
tomorrow.’

‘
As the
cock crows. No more.’ And without further manifestation of any
kind, the angel vanished.

Ashalan had no
more than looked on in horrified disbelief; now he demanded an
explanation. Feeling he no longer owed the angel anything,
including silence, Jadrin told him the whole story. At the end of
it, he stood back, expecting Ashalan’s rage, but the king merely
shook his head and held out his arms. ‘Beloved,’ he said, ‘you are
a dreaming romantic boy.’

Jadrin’s body
stiffened in affront. ‘I am no longer a boy and there was nothing
romantic about what I did. When Lailahel returns tomorrow another
child shall be in Nothing’s place. Nothing shall be in the temple
being consecrated to the Goddess!’

And so, long
before dawn, Jadrin carried Nothing to the creamy-stoned temple. He
roused the priests, who sleepily shuffled into the Hall of Naming
and lit the candles and incense.

‘
Hurry,’
Jadrin said, glancing through the windows. Only grey light showed
outside.

They named the
child Jadalan, for his parents, and crowned him with myrtle leaves.
Surely no malefic entity could touch him now. Jadrin knelt before
the altar and entreated the Goddess to protect the child. Perhaps
he had done wrong in invoking the angel, but it had been done for
love and without evil intent. Feeling reassured, Jadrin went back
to the palace, leaving Jadalan in the care of the priests. At dawn,
the angel came to him in his sitting-room.

Jadrin was
holding a child on his knee, a happy, bonny creature. ‘Then take
him,’ Jadrin said and held the child out, turning away as the
angel’s glowing fingers closed around the plump, pink body.

‘
You had
your wish, Lord Jadrin,’ Lailahel said, ‘and several years’
enjoyment of it too. Think yourself blessed that I concurred with
your desires at all!’

‘
Forgive
my ingratitude,’ Jadrin replied curtly, ‘but I can find no comfort
in your words. Just take the child and go.’

Lailahel put
the child onto his back and flew up through the ceiling,
manifesting himself on another plane of existence. There was quite
a journey ahead to the angel’s palace of light, but travelling
through the aether is an intense pleasure in itself and time means
nothing there. Pausing to rest, Lailahel put the child down upon a
glittering crystal rock.

‘
Well,’
it said, ‘Soon you will be a long, long way from the place you know
as home. Do you wonder what your parents are doing now, little
nothing child?’

‘
I know
what,’ the child said frankly. ‘My mother will be feeding the hens
behind the kitchens and my father will be putting new loaves into
the oven.’

With a
horrified howl, the angel realised that he had been tricked.
Furiously, he cast the child back into the world of men, some yards
from the city gates.’Find your own way home!’ it boomed. ‘And tell
Lord Jadrin I will be back at sunset!’

‘
It was
a mistake,’ Jadrin said mildly when Lailahel returned.

‘
Mistake? Don’t try my patience. Don’t try to tell me you
don’t know your own child, Lord Jadrin!’ The angel glowered,
emitting a poisonous aura of brown and livid red.

Jadrin
shrugged. ‘Nothing is very similar indeed to the baker’s son. I was
distraught at losing him, blind with grief. The child you want is
playing with the dogs on the terrace. Take him, take him.’

‘
You
should apologise for the inconvenience you have caused me,’ said
the angel in a peevish voice. ‘Otherwise, I could cause all of your
hair to fall dead upon the floor and really blind you, forever,
grief or no grief.’

‘
I am
mortified!’ Jadrin clutched his throat, a picture of wounded
innocence.

Lailahel
experienced a pang of satisfaction that such a beautiful creature
had formed the magical child he intended to abduct. ‘Very well.
Have no fears for the boy, Jadrin. He shall grow in power and
magificence far more than he could have done under your care.’ And
in a whirl of light, Lailahel, formless and spiralling, swept out
of the window and across the terrace. A black haired boy sat upon
the chequered, marble tiles whispering to a pair of panting,
grinning hounds. Light enfolded him, warm and strong as hands.
Still giggling, the child was borne aloft, tossed onto the angel’s
back and away.

This time,
they travelled overland; fields and forests passed beneath them as
they rushed towards the sinking sun. Lailahel listened with
pleasure to the delighted cries of the child as the world flashed
by beneath them. However, a faint but persistant niggle of doubt
caused him to sigh, ‘You will soon be far from the world you know,
little nothing child. Do you wonder what your parents are doing
now?’

‘
That’s
easy!’ responded the child, precociously, ‘My father will be
waiting on table in the king’s apartments while my mother mends
lace in the butler’s parlour.’

Only the fact
that he was prince of conception and thus, in some ways, a patron
of children, prevented Lailahel from hurling the unfortunate boy to
the ground and hurtling straight to Ashbrilim to raze the palace to
the ground. He swallowed his fury and with a graceful curl, skimmed
around and flew back the way he had come.

Jadrin and
Ashalan, as the child had predicted, were indeed sitting down to
enjoy their evening meal. The light had not yet vanished from the
sky when all the long, arched windows of the dining-room burst
asunder and the angel Lailahel gusted into the room. With
frightening calm, he strode over to the table and placed the
butler’s child among the tureens of vegetables. ‘Your servant may
be missing this,’ the angel said dryly.

Jadrin
attempted to bluster some reply but the angel raised his hand and
shook his head.

‘
I don’t
want to hear your excuses, Lord Jadrin. There is only one thing to
be said and it is this. Unless the real child of your blood is
brought to me immediately, I shall be forced to shake this
magnificent and historic building to rubble and then curse you and
your beloved king with a dreadful plague, which you shall
unwittingly spread to all your subjects before dying a particularly
painful and undignified death. I hope I’ve made my intentions
clear.’

‘
I don’t
think there can be any doubt as to your determination,’ Jadrin said
in a choked voice. He turned to Ashalan. ‘We have no choice. We
will have to give up our son.’

‘
You
should never have done this, Jadrin,’ Ashalan said. He called for
the butler. ‘Your son is returned to you,’ he said. ‘Have no fear,
we appreciate the service you did for us and you and your wife may
keep the gold we gave you. Be thankful that events have turned out
this way. Now, be so good as to have your good woman bring out
Prince Jadalan.’

With great
sorrow, Jadrin handed his son to the angel, who smiled and said,
‘In future, have the good sense to adopt some earthly child, Lord
Jadrin. I believe there are plenty of them about. Good evening to
you!’ And with a spiral of blinding effulgence, he whisked the
child onto his back and flew away, towards the red sky of the
west.

As they
streaked between the rosy clouds Lailahel felt to compelled to ask,
‘What do you suppose your parents are doing now, little nothing
child?’

Prince Jadalan
curled his perfect little white fists in the angel’s streaming hair
and said, ‘You know very well, Lord Lailahel. They will be grieving
my loss and perhaps ordering somebody to sweep up the glass in the
their dining-room.’

Thus, with a
deeply satisfied laugh, the angel looped and wheeled and
disappeared from the world of men taking Jadalan the changeling
child with him.

Living with
the Angel

There are
echoes of the androgynous Wraeththu in this story, probably because
it was written while I was working on ‘Enchantments of Flesh and
Spirit’. At the time, I was pondering deeply the concept of gender
and identification, although probably wouldn’t have thought of it
in those terms. I must have been playing with these ideas when I
devised Variel’s fate in this piece, because if I had followed the
premise and theme of the previous two stories in the sequence, it
wouldn’t have happened. I don’t want to say more than that in the
introduction, because it will give the plot away.

Lailahel,
prince of conception, lived in a far and mystical realm, high above
the souls and aspirations of mankind. His home was a wondrous
palace, wrought of light and sound, where every room had a
mysterious tale to tell and strange aethers roamed the tall,
echoing corridors.

Jadalan, the
abducted son of the King of Ashbrilim, was very impressed with this
new home. Because he was only a child, because he was only
half-human and because of the angel’s potent power, the memory of
his old life soon began to fade. Away went the vision of green
fields stretching beyond the city walls. Away, the sight of rolling
forests to the north, skirting the great purple mountains where the
night eagles lived. Forgotten too, were the faces of Jadalan’s
parents; the witch-boy Jadrin and the king himself. Estranged from
the lands of men, Jadalan became more angel than human.

Now, sometimes
angels stretch and stretch so far that they release a portion of
themselves into new reality. Lailahel had done this once and had
formed for himself a son of his own - though son is not really the
word for an angel child. As all angelic creatures, they are neither
one gender nor the other, but something of both and sometimes
nothing of either. Lailahel’s child was named Variel. He was
pleased to have a companion, especially one as strange and
unethereal as Jadalan. Wherever Jadalan walked in the palace,
things came into being as if he called them from the air. Variel
could not do that and was delighted when Jadalan made him dogs and
jewels and bizarre furniture. ‘It was there all the time,’ Jadalan
would say.

‘
But
no-one can make them real like you can,’ Variel would
reply.

They played
together in the crystal fields beyond the palace, where ferns the
size of houses swayed and sang to them. Jadalan learned all about
the spirits that live beyond the senses of a human and how to call
them up and speak with them.The air always smelled of jasmin in
that place and at night the sky became a deep, rich purple, but
there were no stars. Jadalan slept in a bed of sighing mist and ate
from bowls of honeyed ambrosia whenever he was hungry. Lailahel,
obviously genuinely fond of the boy, taught him many arcane things
and would brush out his hair with the sparks that flowed from his
fingers. Jadrin’s childhood, therefore, was nothing other than
idyllic, but Lailahel was careful to teach the boy about the dark
side of existence; misery, loss, privation and pain. The angel knew
that if the boy remained ignorant of these things he could only
ever exist as a powerless half-creature. However, Jadalan’s
journeys through such experiences were always necessarily those of
the mind and he would always wake up to the soothing light of his
wondrous home and the cries of his nightmares would fade away to
mere lessons in his head. Nonetheless, he learned and grew to be a
wise yet joyful sixteen year old, with more angel in him than he’d
ever have had growing up in the gardens of Ashbrilim.As he grew in
wisdom, so he grew in beauty and eventually because of the close
proximity in which they existed, Jadalan and Variel fell in love.
Neither of them particularly understood what they were feeling
because they were very innocent and neither of them had any idea
what the strange sensations in their bodies could mean or how they
could be satisfied. Lailahel noticed their growing closeness with
unease.He knew that if they discovered the pleasures of the flesh,
they might want to leave and form their own astral palace. Lailahel
would no longer have control of either of them. Caught up in a
maelstrom of jealousy, that had more than one cause, Lailahel
decided that Jadalan would have to leave the palace of light.
Variel was of his essence; the angel could not bear to lose
him.