Thorn Boy and Other Dreams of Dark Desire (42 page)

‘
I can
do far more than guide a boat. I have great magics.’

‘
Just
help me get these boys back to their beds.’

In the
morning, as usual, the queen came to the bedchamber. I had already
made some preparations and was ready for her. Calobel and Cataban
lay stupefied upon their beds and indeed now looked close to death,
for their breathing rattled in their chests. The queen glanced
askance at my new servant, whose name I’d learned was Gart.

‘
My sons
look the same to me,’ said the queen. ‘And now you will hang. I had
entertained great hopes for you. It is a great pity.’

‘
I have
solved the mystery,’ I said. ‘There will be no hanging. Have the
princes conveyed to a room where you and your husband can watch me
break the enchantment.’

Frowning at
me, the queen nodded her head. ‘Very well, but I think you are
misleading yourself.’ She gestured at Gart. ‘What is that
beast?’

‘
My
servant,’ I said. ‘We should make haste. It appears the enchantment
is finally sucking out the princes’ lives.’

Even as I
spoke, I was aware of strange movements within the bundle of cloth
that lay on the couch, and which the queen had not noticed was
leaking unsavoury fluids. I had a suspicion that the demons might
still have power even without their bodies.

Calobel and
Cataban were carried on litters to the great throne room, where the
king had convened all his courtiers. I stood before him and he
said. ‘Is it plain to me that you have failed where all others have
failed. What is the purpose of bringing my sons here? Soon, you
will dangle in the courtyard.’

‘
Indeed
I will not,’ I said. ‘I have followed your sons for three nights to
a subterranean realm, where they have danced the night away. They
were ensorcelled by demons, who sought to devour their life
force.’

‘
Rubbish!’ exclaimed the king. ‘This story is
preposterous.’

‘
In this
place,’ I said, ‘the trees are made of gold and silver, and their
leaves are made of jewels.’ I took from my jacket the jewelled
twig.

‘
A
bauble,’ said the king, ‘a pin for a lady’s hair.’

Sighing I
plucked a tiny leaf from the twig and put the rest of it back in my
jacket. ‘In this place, they have magical artefacts and here I have
a chalice of smoke and fire.’ I withdrew the goblet from my jacket
and held it up for all to see. A few courtiers around the chamber
made soft sounds of surprise, for indeed the chalice was a
beautiful thing, glinting with eerie flames within its depths,
around which threads of purple smoke drifted and writhed.

‘
Conjuror’s tricks!’ declared the king. ‘Any witch could have
made you that.’

‘
This
place was ruled by two demons,’ I said. ‘And these I slew to rescue
your sons, who but for me would now be dead.’

‘
They
appear near dead in any case,’ said the king in a hostile tone.
‘And where are the demons you spoke of?’

‘
Here,’
I said and taking the bundle from Gart who stood behind me, I
unwrapped it and threw its contents onto the floor. They rolled to
the foot of the king’s dais.

The entire
court let out cries of horror, for in this world the demons were
not beautiful. Their facial features writhed and sneered and they
uttered abominations.

The king stood
up. ‘My sons are dying,’ he said, staring with wide eyes at the
rolling heads. ‘Does this count as success?’

I said nothing
but took out the goblet from my jacket once more and crushed the
tiny leaf in my hand. These fragments I put into the goblet. At my
signal, Gart lifted one of the demon heads, which protested
greatly, and squeezed some black blood from the stump of its neck
into the goblet. I mixed the potion with my fingers, then went to
the princes to administer it, all the while praying to every god
that existed that this would work.

The princes
drank the foul juice I poured between their lips and for some
moments moaned piteously upon their litters. Then Calobel sat up
and said, ‘Papa, Mama, what are we doing here?’

At once, the
entire court broke into tears and cheers and everyone began to clap
loudly at my success. The queen ran to her sons and embraced them.
Now, though still comely, they looked like ordinary young men,
yawning and stretching and wondering where they were. I doubted
they would remember any of what had happened to them, which was
probably just as well.

‘
Take
these demon heads,’ I said to king, ‘and convey them to a place
where you must light a brazier. Throw salt into the flames and then
burn the heads. In this way, they will be utterly destroyed. Then,
we shall talk about my reimbursement for this task.’

‘
You are
an astounding woman,’ said the king. ‘Name your price and I will
gladly pay it.’

So, there it
was. The mystery solved, the enchantment broken. If I’d entered the
city along the canal road, I might not have succeeded, and if I’d
not heeded the elemental’s words, I would have certainly failed,
but I pay attention to omens and advice, so I was instead a
heroine, heaped with rewards and praise. The king and queen were
most insistent I should marry one of the twins and become a
princess, but however handsome the princes were, they were tainted
in my eyes, and anyway, I had no desire to live a fat contented
life. Instead, I summoned my new servant, Gart, who was proving
himself more every day to be an entertaining and resourceful
companion, and we rode out of Rappernape on fine horses with full
purses. Perhaps for some weeks, we will enjoy the countryside
before finding new adventures. Even the strongest, most
quick-witted heroine deserves a holiday now and again.

Blue Flame of
a Candle

This story
first appeared in one of Pete Crowther’s anthologies, ‘Tombs’. It
was inspired by a piece I read in a magazine concerning the lost
tomb of Alexander the Great. I imagined how it would be if it still
existed today, complete with a perfectly-preserved body of the
great conqueror. The body in ‘Blue Flame’s’ tomb is not a warrior,
but a prophet. I am fascinated by prophets, and wrote about the
subject in depth in my novel ‘Sign for the Sacred’.

‘
Blue Flame’ was also inspired by a friend’s description of
first seeing the pyramids, and how they looked like gigantic
spacecraft against the sky, and how, according to a dictionary of
mythology I have, a ‘blue woman’ is she ‘whose presence chills and
dismays men’. I mixed these images with that of the Great Library
of Alexandria, and the story was born. The great river in it is
like the Nile, where ancient idols of forgotten gods dream in the
shallows, surrounded by browsing water cattle and covered with
children who shout and wave at passengers on passing boats. Here is
Egypt reinvented, the Egypt of my most escapist visions.

The pilot went
ashore again in the blue pre-dawn, carrying his lantern, a gobbet
of yellow in the twilight. I was lying on deck, for the heat on
that part of the river is almost unbearable, and I saw his bobbing
progress up the steep bank path, towards the black silhouette of
the temple. He did not use the wide steps that ran down into the
water because women were burning the dead there in the dawn chill,
their lamenting voices ringing out like a plait of sounds. I
fancied I could almost see the ectoplasmic trail of it over the
river, but it was likely to have been only smoke from the pyres.
The air smelled of charred roses and cooking meat.

The
Emmeshara
drifted
sideways on the water like a sleeping thing, and the oars were all
upright, a palisade against the land. Two other pilgrims came out
on deck, shaking little rattles and muttering prayers. I thought
that was senseless, because the pilot had yet to identify which god
held sway on the shore. What if the pilgrims were praying to the
wrong one? They all cared so much about that kind of
thing.

We were
nearing the end of our journey, and both crew and passengers were
skittish. I felt like an impostor, disassociated from their fervour
because I was only there to accompany my father. This was his
pilgrimage, his life-time desire made real. He did not trust me to
remain at home without him for, although I was as strong and able
as any young man, my father considered me too young and bound to
cause trouble, lose his business or burn down the house. It was
preferable to shut up shop for the six months it would take us to
sail up the great river to Charidotis, to the tomb of the prophet,
Mipacanthus. I was bored and too hot; a miserable companion for my
father, who was full of a bizarre kind of zealous serenity.

‘
When we
gaze upon the body, everything will change,’ he told me. ‘A
different knowledge will come to us.’

He would never
know how true those words were. I never told him what happened to
me in Charidotis.

Though dead
for a thousand years, the corpse of Mipacanthus lies in his crystal
sarcophagus, reputedly uncorrupted and as beautiful as he had been
in life. I did not believe it. I knew the ‘corpse’ had to be a
waxwork likeness, or an artfully painted wooden statue. My father’s
eyes would see sleeping flesh, because that was what he wanted to
see. I knew I would only see craftsmanship and, occasionally, in my
most waspish mood, I couldn’t help telling my father this.

‘
You
young ones,’ he would answer patiently. ‘So much of the wonder of
life has dried up inside you, but you will see, you will
see.’

I could not be
interested. All that concerned me at that time was the burgeoning
of maturing youth within my body, my approach to manhood. Spiritual
truths, or untruths, meant little to me.

Daily,
since we had left the city of Elanen, our home, the pilgrims had
gathered on deck, under a faded green awning, fringed by tassels.
Here, they would produce their books of prophecies. My father would
produce his own: a small, densely-printed volume, covered in
oil-green leather, entitled
The
Millennium
. Within its pages the utterances of
Mipacanthus were interpreted by Cairus Casso, a scholar fifty years
dead. There were as many interpreters of the prophet’s quatrains as
there were prophecies, and each of them differed in definition.
Cairus was a mystic, and his renderings of the chaotic words
offered mantras to enrich the spirit, presaging a time when men and
women aspired to godhood. Others, such as Adragor the Lame,
promised only war, famine and bloodshed. Personally, after many
tedious afternoons of suffering the differing translations read
aloud, I had come to believe that Mipacanthus had been a poet
rather than a prophet (and a rather florid one, at that), but I
kept this opinion to myself. I endured the ennui, sustained by the
knowledge that, come sundown, as the cook prepared supper, the
pilgrims would begin to argue heatedly. A few evenings past, one
man threw himself overboard in pique, and we had to fish him -
still ranting -out of the river with a pole.

By the time
the pilot came back on board, everyone was up on deck, and the cook
had begun preparing breakfast. Savoury aromas competed with the
charnel house perfume of the corpse-burnings. Apparently, the river
deity, Rooroorus, held sway at this point. (The previous month, no
doubt, it had been someone else.) Now we all had to strip off and
bathe in the river, as a mark of deference to the god. As I
floated, shivering, though at least thankful for the blessed cool,
I eyed with misgivings the women sweeping charred rubbish off the
river steps into the water. A grey soapy-looking scum floated by
me. Seemingly oblivious to this, my father swam contentedly up and
down, his expression tranquil. It disgusted me so much I went back
on board, whether I had spent enough time in the water or not. The
cook, being a foreigner, was sympathetic, and gave me some titbits
while we waited for the pilgrims to finish their ablutions.

As we
ate our grilled fish and bread bobbins, the
Emmeshara
lazily turned a corner of the river,
the towering, hanging trees peeled away, and the horizon became
dominated by an enormous obsidian statue, a seated god, perhaps no
longer worshipped, or an ancient king. It was a splendid sight. His
toes dipped into the water, and people had built stilted huts
between them. Children looked out from a hole in the belly of the
colossus and waved to us. Cattle waded in the river shallows under
the shadow of the stone, tethered to the giant toes, browsing upon
shivering reeds. I stood beside the rail, drinking in the details,
next to a woman veiled from head to foot, who wore a face-mask of
hanging coins, denominations from around the world. I knew her name
was Moomi, though we had only nodded at one another previously. Now
she nudged me with her elbow and said, in a deep, thickly-accented
voice. ‘He de fader od de Great One’. She gestured at the
statue.

‘
Father
of Mipacanthus?’ I asked.

She
nodded and guttered, ‘Oi, oi,’ which I presumed meant
yes
.

I reflected
that I would not have seen any of this if I had stayed at home, but
regretted I had no real chance to explore the wonders I saw. We
just passed them by, every one. At least in Charidotis, I would be
able to wander around, while my father contemplated the abiding
beauty of the dead prophet.

The paddling
god-king, the river steps, were the gateway to Charidotis; we were
nearer to our destination than I had thought. By mid-afternoon, the
river widened and became divided by a labyrinth of jetties and
piers. Ships and smaller boats negotiated the maze. Market stalls
thronged every available surface, some jutting out over the water,
their goods swaying perilously in a hot afternoon breeze, which had
arisen, surprisingly, from nowhere. A babble of conflicting
languages, nonsense tongues, filled the air, and it smelled oily,
like cold lamb-fat mixed with myrrh.