Indeed the resemblance was less to a jungle than to some undersea reef, not least because the plants' prodigious growth made them sway as if moved by a tide. Their colours and their forms were utterly various; not one was like its neighbour. All they had in common was their enthusiasm for growth, for fruitfulness. Clouds of scented pollen were being expelled like breaths; pulsing blossoms were turning their heads to the clouds, as if the lightning was a kind of sustenance; roots were spreading underfoot with such violence the earth trembled.
Yet there was nothing threatening in this surge of life. The eagerness here was simply the eagerness of the new born. They grew for the pleasure of growing.
Then, from off to her right, she heard a cry; or something like a cry. Was it Cal? No; there was no sign of the trail dividing. It came again, somewhere between a sob and a sigh. It was impossible to ignore, despite her mission. Promising herself only the briefest of detours, she followed the sound.
Distance was so deceptive here. She'd advanced perhaps two dozen yards from the trail when the air unveiled the source of the sound.
It was a plant, the first living thing she'd seen here beyond the limits of the trail, with which it shared the same multiplicity of forms and brilliance of colour. It was the size of a small tree, its heart a knot of boughs so complex she suspected it must be several plants growing together in one spot. She heard rustling in the blossom-laden thicket, and amongst the serpentine roots, but she couldn't see the creature whose call had brought her here.
Something did become apparent, however: that the knot at the centre of the tree, all but lost amongst the foliage, was a human corpse. If she needed further confirmation it was in plain sight. Fragments of a fine suit, hanging from the boughs like the sloughed skins of executive snakes; a shoe, parcelled up in tendrils. The clothes had been shredded so that the dead flesh could be claimed by flora; green life springing up where red had failed. The corpse's legs had grown woody, and sprouted knotted roots; shoots were exploding from its innards.
There was no time to linger and look; she had work to do. She made one circuit of the tree, and was about to return to the path when she saw a pair of living eyes staring out at her from the leaves. She yelped. They blinked. Tentatively, she reached forward, and parted the twigs.
The head of the man she'd taken for dead was on almost back to front, and his skull had been cracked wide open. But everywhere the wounds had bred sumptuous life. A beard, lush as new grass, grew around a mossy mouth which ran with sap; floret-laden twigs broke from the cheeks.
The eyes watched her intently, and she felt moist tendrils reaching up to investigate her face and hair.
Then, its blossoms shaking as it drew breath, the hybrid spoke. One long, soft word.
‘Amialive.'
Was it naming itself? When she'd overcome her surprise, she told it she didn't understand.
It seemed to frown. There was a fall of petals from its crown of flowers. The throat pulsed, and then regurgitated the syllables, this time better punctuated.
‘Am ia live?'
‘Are you alive?' she said, comprehending now. ‘Of course. Of course you're alive.'
‘I thought I was dreaming,' it said, its eyes wandering from its perusal of her a while, then returning. ‘Dead, or dreaming. Or both. One moment ... bricks in the air, breaking my head...'
‘Shearman's house?' she said.
‘Ah. You were there?'
The Auction. You were at the Auction.'
It laughed to itself, and its humour tingled against her cheek.
‘I always wanted ... to be inside ...' he said, ‘... inside...'
And now she understood the how and why of this. Though it was odd to think - odd? it was incredible - that this creature had been one of Shadwell's party, that was what she construed. Injured, or perhaps killed in the destruction of the house, he'd somehow been caught up in the Gyre, which had turned his broken body to this flowering purpose.
Her face must have registered her distress at his state, for the tendrils empathized, and grew jittery.
‘So I'm not dreaming then,' the hybrid said.
‘No.'
‘Strange,' came the reply. ‘I thought I was. It's so like paradise.'
She wasn't sure she'd heard correctly.
‘Paradise?' she said.
‘I never dared hope ... life would be such pleasure.'
She smiled. The tendrils were soothed.
This is Wonderland,' the hybrid said.
‘Really?'
‘Oh yes. We're near to where the Weave began; near to the Temple of the Loom. Here everything transforms, everything becomes. Me? I was lost. Look at me now. How I am!'
Hearing his boast her mind went back to the adventures she'd had in the book; how, in that no-man's-land between words and the world, everything had been transforming and becoming, and her mind, married in hatred with Hobart's, had been the energy of that condition. She the warp to his weft. Thoughts from different skulls, crossing, and making a material place from their conflict.
It was all part of the same procedure.
The knowledge was slippery; she wanted an equation in which she could fix the lesson, in case she could put it to use. But there were more pressing issues now than the higher mathematics of the imagination.
‘I must go,' she said.
‘Of course you must.'
‘There are others here.'
‘I saw,' said the hybrid. ‘Passing overhead.'
‘Overhead?'
‘Towards the Loom.'
3
Towards the Loom.
She retraced her steps to the trail with fresh enthusiasm. The fact of the buyer's existence in the Gyre, apparently accepted by the forces here - even welcomed - gave her some hope that the mere presence of a trespasser was not sufficient to make the Gyre turn itself -inside out. Its sensitivity had apparently been overestimated. It was strong enough to deal with an invading force in its own inimitable fashion.
Her skin had begun to itch, and there was a restlessness in her gut. She tried not to think too hard of what this signified, but the irritation increased as she again followed the trail. The atmosphere was thickening now; the world around her darkening. It wasn't night's darkness, coaxing sleep. The murk buzzed with life. She could taste it, sweet and sour. She could see it, busy behind her eyes.
She'd gone only a little way when something ran across her feet. She looked down to see an animal - an unlikely cross between squirrel and centipede, eyes bright, legs innumerable, cavorting between the roots. Nor, she now realized, was the creature alone. The forest was inhabited. Animals, as numerous and as remarkable as the plant-life, were spilling out from the undergrowth, changing even as they hopped and squirmed, more ambitious by the breath.
Their origins?: the plants. The flora had parented its own fauna; its buds flowering into insects, its fruits growing fur and scales. A plant opened, and butterflies rose in a flickering cloud; in a thorn thicket birds were fluttering into life; from a tree trunk, white snakes poured like sentient sap.
The air was so thick now she could have sliced it, new creatures crossing her path with every yard she advanced, only to be eclipsed by the murk. Something that was a distant relation of the armadillo waddled in front of her; three variations on the theme of ape came and went; a golden dog cavorted amongst the flowers. And so on. And so forth.
She had no doubt now why her skin itched. It longed to join this game of changes, to throw itself back into the melting pot and find a new design. Her mind, too, was half seduced by the notion. Amongst such joyous invention it seemed churlish to cleave to a single anatomy.
Indeed she might have succumbed in time to these temptations of the flesh, but that ahead of her a building now emerged from the fog: a plain brick building which she caught sight of for an instant before the air enclosed it again. Plain as it was, this could only be the Temple of the Loom.