‘Of course. She undid my rapture, to tempt the Cuckoos. And tempting I was. Did you see the woman in the blue dress?'
‘Briefly.'
‘She fell for me on sight,' said Nimrod. ‘Perhaps I should find her. She's going to need some tenderness, things being what they are -' and without another word he turned back towards the house, which was well on its way to rubble. Only as he disappeared in the confusion of light and dust did Cal notice that in his true shape Nimrod possessed a tail.
Doubtless he could look after himself, but there were others Cal was still concerned for. Suzanna, for one, and Apolline, whom he'd last seen lying beside Freddy in the ante-chamber to the Auction Room. All was din and destruction, but he started back towards the house nevertheless, to see if he could find them.
It was like swimming against a technicolour tide. Strands, late-born, flew and burst about him, some breaking against his body. They were kinder by far to living tissue than they were to brick. Their touch didn't wound him, but lent him fresh energy. His body tingled as though he'd stepped from an ice-water shower. His head sang.
There was no sign of the enemy. He hoped Shadwell had been buried in the house, but he knew too much of the luck of the wicked to believe this likely. He did however glimpse several of the buyers wandering in the brightness. They didn't aid each other, but made their way as solitaries, either gazing at the ground for fear it open beneath their feet, or stumbling, hands masking their tears.
As he came within thirty yards of the house there was a further burst of activity from within, as the great cloud of the Gyre, spitting lightning, shrugged off the walls that had confined it, and blossomed in all directions.
He had time enough to see the figure of one of the buyers consumed by the cloud, then he turned and ran.
A wave of dust threw him on his way; filaments of brightness flew to left and right of him like ribbons in a hurricane. A second wave followed, this time of brick-shards and furniture. His breath was snatched from his lips, and his legs from beneath him. Then he was performing acrobatics, head over heels, no longer knowing Heaven from Earth.
He didn't try to resist, even if resistance had been possible, but let the fast train take him wherever it chose to go.
BOOK TWO. THE FUGUE
Part Five. Revels
‘Flee into some forgotten night and be Of all dark long my moon-bright company; Beyond the rumour even of Paradise come. There, out of all remembrance, make our home.' Walter de la Mare The Tryst
I
CAL, AMONGST MIRACLES
1
True joy is a profound remembering; and true grief the same.
Thus it was, when the dust storm that had snatched Cal up finally died, and he opened his eyes to see the Fugue spread before him, he felt as though the few fragile moments of epiphany he'd tasted in his twenty-six years - tasted but always lost - were here redeemed and wed. He'd grasped fragments of this delight before. Heard rumour of it in the womb-dream and the dream of love; known it in lullabies. But never, until now, the whole, the thing entire. It would be, he idly thought, a fine time to die. And a finer time still to live, with so much laid out before him.
He was on a hill. Not high, but high enough to offer a vantage point. He got to his feet and surveyed this new-found land.
The unknotting of the carpet had by no means finished; the raptures of the Loom were far too complex to be so readily reversed. But the groundwork was laid: hills, fields, forest, and much else besides.
Last time he'd set eyes on this place it had been from a bird's eye view, and the landscape had seemed various enough. But from the human perspective its profusion verged on the riotous. It was as if a vast suitcase, packed in great haste, had been upturned, its contents scattered in hopeless disarray.
There appeared to be no system to the geography, just a random assembling of spots the Seerkind had loved enough to snatch from destruction. Butterfly copses and placid water-meadows; lairs and walled sanctuaries; keeps, rivers and standing stones.
Few of these locations were complete: most were slivers and snatches, fragments of the Kingdom ceded to the Fugue behind humanity's back. The haunted corners of familiar rooms that would neither be missed nor mourned, where children had perhaps seen ghosts or saints; where the fugitive might be comforted and not know why, and the suicide find reason for another breath.
Amid this disorder, the most curious juxtapositions abounded. Here a bridge, parted from the chasm it had crossed, sat in a field, spanning poppies; there an obelisk stood in the middle of a pool, gazing at its reflection.
One sight in particular caught Cal's eye.
It was a hill, which rose almost straight-sided to a tree-crowned summit. Lights moved over its face, and danced amongst the branches. Having no sense of direction here, he decided to make his way down towards it.
There was music playing somewhere in the night. It came to him by fits and starts, at the behest of the breeze. Drums and violins; a mingling of Strauss and Sioux. And occasionally, evidence of people too. Whispers in the trees; shadowed figures beneath a canopy which stood in the middle of a waist-high field of grain. But the creatures were fugitive; they came and went too quickly for him to gain more than a fleeting impression. Whether this was because they knew him for the Cuckoo he was, or simply out of shyness, only time would tell. Certainly he felt no threat here, despite the fact that he was, in a sense, trespassing. On the contrary, he felt utterly at peace with the world and himself. So much so that his concern for the others here - Suzanna, Apolline, Jerichau, Nimrod -was quite remote. When his thoughts did touch upon them it was only to imagine them wandering as he was wandering, lost among miracles. No harm could come to them; not here. Here was an end to harm, and malice, and envy too. Having
this living rapture wrapping him round, what was left to envy or desire?
He was within a hundred yards of the hill and stood before it in amazement. The lights he'd seen from a distance were in fact human fire-flies; wingless, but describing effortless arabesques around the hill. There was no communication between them that he could hear, yet they had the precision of daredevils, their manoeuvres repeatedly bringing them within a hair's breadth of each other.
‘You must be Mooney.'
The speaker's voice was soft, but it broke the hold the lights had on him. Cal looked off to his right. Two figures were standing in the shade of an archway, their faces still immersed in darkness. All he could see were the two blue-grey ovals of their faces, hanging beneath the arch like lanterns.
‘Yes. I'm Mooney,' he said. Show yourselves, he thought. ‘How do you know my name?'
‘News travels fast here,' came the reply. The voice seemed slightly softer and more fluting than the first, but he couldn't be certain it wasn't the same speaker. ‘It's the air,' said his informant. ‘It gossips.'
Now one of the pair stepped into the night-light. The soft illumination from the hill moved on his face, lending it strangeness, but even had Cal seen it by daylight this was a face to be haunted by. He was young, yet completely bald, his features powdered to remove any modulation in skin-tone, his mouth and eyes almost too wet, too vulnerable, in the mask of his features.
‘I'm Boaz,' he said. ‘You're welcome, Mooney.'
He took Cal's hand, and shook it, and as he did so his companion broke her covenant with shadow.
‘You can see the Amadou?' she said.
It took Cal several seconds to conclude that the second speaker was indeed a woman, the processes of his doubt in turn throwing doubt on the sex of Boaz, for the two were very close to being identical twins.