Force Majeure (20 page)

Then I might as well kill you, but I must ask Kay first. Kay? Yes, she is my ally, didn’t you know? She is in my bed now, waiting for me. She was the cat. She was my mistress in the red dress. You saw her eyes; you know it’s true. She is more than just one of us. She
is
Prospero, the whole reason that we’re here together in this room.

No!

Yes! I am her instrument. Everything I do is her will. When this is over, when Doctor Arkadin is dead, it will be Kay who sits on the dragon throne and rules Candida.

No! Not Kay! She’s my friend.

As predicted, Kay didn’t sleep that night. She returned to her cell with Esteban’s book held naked in her hands, too tired to keep up the effort of concealing it. Her old room was familiar enough to be negotiable without any light. Azure’s bed glistened unslept in; her own, she knew, would be half-ruffled, half-made, as she’d left it the previous morning. The chalk shadows on the walls were frozen in time, ignoring her. One of them, the livid red woman, was Kay herself. She wanted to erase it. No, she wanted to sleep. She wanted to forget and be forgotten. Without changing, she climbed onto her cot. Hours later, as the dawn began to blush through the cracks in the shutters, she was still hatefully awake.

She lay on the cot, shuddering. The unkempt sheets were a bed of insects. There was pain, the distressed lump in her chest, like a high stitch, like she’d been running. She put a hand under her tunic, feeling for the knot. Her fingers traced the line of her ribs, trying to find a way in. Not asleep, not dreaming, she imagined using her sharp fingernails to dig in between the bone and squeeze out the growth. It was a cancer, it was a misplaced embryo, it was a clot of jaundiced bile. It would seep pus like teenage acne. It was an egg laid in her body, it would hatch.

She didn’t sleep. She lost herself in her unrelaxing fantasies, and when the dawn came she had bitten her sharp fingernails down to nothing.

She gave up eventually and went to the bathroom, taking the book as toilet reading.

It wasn’t, she soon surmised, Doctor Arkadin’s personal journal. Assuming it was authentic, then it was the work of one of his company, Team Arkadin. The first entry, a brief description of the geography covered in a day, dropped her into the expedition without explanation. The author was familiar with her circumstances and didn’t bother elaborating for her readers. That suggested two possibilities: either this wasn’t the first volume, or the writer had been moved to start it only as Arkadin’s folly blossomed into life.

Kay studied the spine and the binding. There was no indication, that she could see, that this was the second or third or umpteenth book in the set. On later pages, the brisk style became stoic, occasionally frustrated and bad-tempered. The woman who’d once spent a page cataloguing all the wild flowers she’d seen on a single day ceased to be so thorough halfway up the Andes and instead became frighteningly lucid. Doctor Arkadin, wrote the author, was sinking into delusion. She reported his madness with patient, loving clarity. He recited old Celtic fairy tales to her and she recorded them verbatim, with commentary as though they were events they had lived through together. Their voices merged so it was impossible to tell which was Doctor Arkadin’s and which was his confessor’s.

Kay was sure the author was a woman, long before it was confirmed in the text.

She whiled away the early hours with the book, distracting herself from her thoughts of Azure and Xan and the difficult day ahead. She lingered in the bathroom far longer than was necessary, sitting on the flat toilet seat and reading. Beyond the door, in the bedroom, Azure’s empty pallet waited for her as an accusing absence; beyond the house, there was the uncertain city cast in white and grey stone; beyond Candida, there were the breached walls of the world. Doctor Arkadin’s legacy, whatever it amounted to, would be washed away on the day’s tides.

She read until she became hungry. She put the journal away and left to get some breakfast at the refectory. On the way, she met fewer people than usual and no guests. She saw ashen, determined, frightened faces – one was her own, reflected on a metal sheet at the canteen door.

There’s going to be a siege
, she decided,
but a strange one
. There were far too many ways in and out of the old free house for a proper stand-off. The club’s hired guns wouldn’t be able to cover every entrance, even the ones she knew and Xan knew. She ticked them off mentally. She thought of six more fat helicopters bobbing on the air like nectar-heavy bees. Both Xan and Esteban talked about displays of strength. Maybe she was wrong about a siege. The house would be an example. There would be lightning war. There would be shock and awe. The house would be demolished.

Gunpowder ended the fastness of castles and brothels alike.

By the time she returned to her rooms, it had begun. The sound carried through from outside. She leaned cautiously through the balcony shutters. It wasn’t too dangerous yet; all she’d heard were raised voices and threats, in English, in other tongues. Taking her weight again, the balcony swayed. Far below her, the canal waters lapped gently, an oblivious babbling witness.

A troop of mercenaries had gathered on the far bank by the bridge. Their khaki uniforms seemed ludicrously colourless against the stones of the pastel city. The bland façades of Candida revealed more shades and tones and subtle colourings than the invaders could muster. The vegetable-strung walls and rusted metalwork follies were naked rainbows now. Xan’s private army gathered in a protective formation that must have looked aggressive at street-level but from above was a bewildered huddle, threatening to spill out spontaneously into violence. They were more than half the force the Displaced Club had at its disposal, plus a few officers who stood away from the pack and whose loyalties were impossible to gauge from this distance. Kay twitched away, instinctively checking the horizon for the incoming swarm. She looked back. Inscrutable, curious Candidans were pausing in the street to inspect and judge the new Appeared.

Are they Appeared? I suppose they must be.

Xan wasn’t there.

The bridge was blocked by two of the house-girls, both dressed in pale green pyjamas, like Luna’s and Quint’s. Nothing was said, and no-one moved for a long minute. Then, from the bridge, dressed in green and without escorts, came Flower-of-the-Lady to present herself to the invaders. There was some chatter among the mercenaries, perhaps a brief show of hands or the picking of a short straw, and one was propelled forward to parley. Kay didn’t recognise him; she had never seen them in close-up, and his fierce, tanned face – was that from effort or embarrassment? – was as indistinct as the-Lady’s was vivid. She felt for him, not just because she knew how intimidating the chatelaine could be, but because he seemed to have been abandoned by his masters.

Including me.

The speaker held his gun as though it were a starving child and didn’t point it at the-Lady, who stayed motionless and solid except for her corkscrew hair, which twirled on the breeze. The discussion looked heated. The-Lady stood on the lip of the bridge, blocking it with her slender body. The mercenary seemed raw and obese in his heavy fatigues. The prostitutes flanking the-Lady swayed on the same mild wind that caught her hair. Kay realised – a chill burst in her stomach – that this was the best that the house of dragons had to offer and all that it had to defend itself with. She was – they were all – in harm’s way and helpless.

That reminded her of Azure. She looked away, turning her eyes down to the canal beneath her feet. Sunlight fell on her face. She closed her eyes, and the insides were red. Not simply pinkish or rusty orange, but liquid, swirling red, as if a blood vessel had burst and was flooding the socket. The red lingered when she opened her eyes, a shapeless patch imposed over the cityscape. It tricked her brain; for an instant, scarlet butterflies flocked across her line of sight – then they were gone.

The-Lady turned her back on the occupation and returned to the house. Her girls followed. Then the main doors were closed for the first time since Kay had arrived in Candida, out of her sight but echoing with the clatter of prison gates. She heard the keys turning and the bolts drawing, but only in her imagination. Outside, Xan’s gang stood thwarted. One of them broke ranks and strode irritated toward the crowd, brandishing his gun purposefully. It went off, in short bursts, into the air.

The shooter was aiming at an invisible target in the sky, trying to scare the witnesses. They dispersed, but slower than he liked, not fleeing the scene in panic but drifting into doorways and alleys. He fired again, still tilting his gun upwards. To Kay’s ears, trained by television, it sounded tinny and fake. She retreated into the relative safety of her room. The gun rattle continued, but muffled, monotonous as a power drill or a persistent car alarm. If they kept this up, they’d run out of ammunition.

Luna was waiting for her in the door jamb. Her face was dirt-patterned and her pyjamas were torn, exposing the whole of her right breast. She’d been in a fight? No. Quint was there in her shadow, the same rip down the fabric of her top. It was battle-dress. They beckoned to her. She went to them, taking shallow steps.

‘The-Lady says that anyone who wants should leave now’ – Luna.

‘She says that staying will do no good and might make things worse’ – Quint.

‘I’m staying,’ Kay told them, and herself.

‘Don’t stay because you feel guilty.’

‘Don’t stay because you want to fight.’

‘Neither of these things are helpful.’

‘I’m staying,’ she insisted.

They took her by her right shoulder and tore a long red strip from the front of her dress.

No! Not Kay! She’s my friend.

Yes, Kay, and you knew it. Didn’t you know it that night outside the Godma’s cottage, the night when you went flying together, the night you threatened to kill her?

No, that’s a false note of my imagination. Xan couldn’t know about that night, he had no reason to know, and I wouldn’t have imagined it was a threat, I know it wasn’t. It’s pure self-flattery to imagine Xan using barbed words to torment Azure, to turn her against me. He isn’t like that. He wouldn’t talk to her, and Azure wouldn’t talk to him. She only snarls at him, and he will be brutal back to her. He rapes her. Yes. He has raped her. He will rape her. I can imagine that. I know what I would do if I were him, if I were a man, if I were stripped down to my raw and naked drive. He pushes her to the floor and forces her, and I look away because I don’t need to see.

I’m not him.

He sees it as a re-establishment of the natural order, a microcosmic demonstration of what he’ll do to Candida. I imagine them locked together in his war room, the act of violation taking place in the shadow of his unfinished parody of Azure’s beloved city. I saw him with Mae, I saw him with me in my fantasies and imagination, and he was always on top, always the rider, the master, always in control, always the dominant power in all his relationships, and I would have let him last night if Azure hadn’t distracted him and saved me, if the fox hadn’t chased me, if the city hadn’t laid its eggs in me.

Perhaps none of this happened. Perhaps I’m letting my imagination run away with me. Azure is locked away and forgotten. He doesn’t see her and she isn’t harmed. Xan is not a part of me. He denies it, of course, for the wrong reasons, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. I’m not dreaming this, I’m thinking it, so it may not be true at all.

I know what he does to her, because I’m about to see it.

Xan calls for his guards. I know what you are, little bird, because Kay knows what you are. I was with her, lurking inside her, when she sat vigil with you. I know something I can do that will hurt you for the rest of your life. I know how to break you.

No! Not Azure! She’s my friend.

Luna and Quint never explained how they found Azure or smuggled her from the clubhouse. Kay supposed that she hadn’t been well-guarded, once Prospero’s men had spread themselves thin in the streets of Candida. The Gestapo Twins took her back to the lazaret where Kay had sweated out the fever after Azure’s initiation. They brought Kay to her. It was quiet, this deep in the house, but she could still hear the morning guns echoing in her head.

‘This isn’t the safest place in the world,’ Kay protested as they ushered her in.

Luna gave a Candidan shrug. ‘It’s as safe as anywhere. We can get her out again quickly if needs be.’

‘If she wants to go,’ Quint added.

They had put away their trivial cruelties. They’d already reassured her that Azure was alive and safe, but she lay white and motionless on the pallet like a fresh corpse. They had covered her in a blanket (not a shroud) to her neck (not over her face), but Kay assumed the worst. The blanket shivered as Azure breathed, and Kay shivered in sympathy, seeing not real breaths but a trick. There were no other signs of life; she might as well be dead. Kay brushed the bird’s cheek, and it was no warmer nor colder than usual. This wasn’t Azure, it was a fake, it was a Tussaud’s waxwork, a Disneyland automaton.

Blood had pooled, hardened and browned at the foot of the blanket. Kay tugged at the edges, unwrapping the body like a mummy or a dreadful Christmas present. There were crude bandages wrapped round Azure’s pipecleaner legs, absorbing and drying her blood. Her knees and shins had been pressed together, aligning them in a parody of normal sleep.

‘Is that all they did?’ Kay asked. She was afraid to pull back further, to reveal – bruises? lacerations? wounds?