Lucia's Masks (24 page)

Of course, he knew his father loved him. And although she did not often show it, he believed, as he had to believe, that his mother cared for him deeply.

It still amazed him to recall how like his mother Bird Girl looked as she lay ashen and unmoving. Until the attack, he had never noticed this resemblance because Bird Girl was always in motion: fingers aflutter, head swivelling, chin tilted skyward, then lowered, elbows jutted out, then pumping up and down, as if she were making ready to fly. He thought she must be named for the hummingbird, which was a shimmering blur of purple and crimson when it hovered in the air.

In the Egg, he had liked to watch his nature films at regular speed, then replay them in slow motion so that he could study how each living being moved in its environment. Freeze the frame and there was the tiny bird, wings out-flung, ready for uplift.

Surely Bird Girl would not die? He has always given her quite a wide berth, mostly because he found her bright energy and quick speech unsettling. He marvelled at the ease with which she moved in the world: her “superb adaptation to her element.” This was a phrase from one of the nature films, another of the oddments his brain had stored and that would pop up, in or out of context.

For fourteen years, the only element he had known was inside the Egg. The air was clean. Any fluctuations in temperature and light were regulated by sensors tuned to optimum conditions for the human life form. Of whom there were three in the Egg — Father, Mother, Son. And no others, as he had often mourned to himself in his echoing loneliness. No other life forms at all, not even a harmless spider.

He had regularly asked his father for a pet, most particularly a lizard or a snake. The answer was always no. Introducing such a life form into the Egg might compromise their immune systems, his father said.

He had absorbed enough of his father’s stoical forbearance and self-control not to give way to fits of pique. He learned to subdue his disappointment by flinging himself into physical activity. He would plunge into the blue temperate water of the Egg’s swimming pool and turn lap after lap under the watchful gaze of the robotic lifeguard. (Bird Girl would have liked the swimming pool, it occurs to him. She would have said something funny or rude about the lifeguard robot which had a face like a flattened pan.) Or he would apply himself to the punching bag, hurdles, and climbing wall of the Egg’s gymnasium, which his father called Plato’s Playroom. When his distress was most acute, when his yearning for company other than his father’s and his books became a physical ache, he would run.

Running brought the added pleasure of the ineffable light. For the track circled inside the actual perimeter of the Egg. There, he was separated from the external world by a mere membrane of semi-translucent material. Until the day of the explosion, this was as close as Chandelier ever came to the polluted, corrupt world from which his father had sealed his family away. So it perturbed the boy that he found so pleasing this light that had so evil a source. Soft, diffuse, with a tinge of amethyst, its sheen on the track’s air seemed a miraculous medium, buoying him up. He thought sometimes he floated, rather than ran.

How could this be, he asked his father. This was the kind of light that bathed the faces of the people in his mother’s art books. How could it come from so impure a place?

Was it anger he read on his father’s face as he instructed his son yet again on the dangers of illusion? The idea of danger had an instinctual appeal for the young Chandelier, who wisely said no more. But he was too much in awe of his father, too conditioned to life in the Egg, to try an assault on its confines. Besides, he had no reason to doubt his father’s description of the crimes perpetrated minute by minute in the cursed world outside. Think of the Hell-scape of Hieronymus Bosch and multiply it ten times, his father said. These were images Chandelier could not bear to contemplate for long.

The time of the world’s healing would come, his father assured him. Every day, his father monitored the signs, filtering through the news that came to him in encrypted messages from other members of the Arêté. This was a group of intellectuals who had opted, like him, for total seclusion from the world, like the desert mystics of old. The Arêté inhabited caves, eyries, underground bunkers, or manufactured fortresses like the Egg, keeping alive the imperilled sparks of disinterested knowledge, reason, clarity, the power of mythos, and virtues like probity, honour, courage, and empathy. They saw themselves as the guardians of what was best in humankind.

The demons they battled, each in their fastness, were pride (lest they succumb to the folly of elitism) and despair (lest they never see their own time emerge from darkness). Each morning brought the necessary demand that they renew their hope. In their separateness one from the other they fed the spirit in their respective ways, whether through ritual action and prayer, disciplines of attention, or multi-chambered silence. Through the encrypted messages, they offered each other solace, and a basis for faith. They shared their latest daily gleanings from a scrupulous sweep of readings meteorological, atmospheric, and astronomical. They were alert to the slightest cultural shift. Reports of a pen scratching words on paper, or of a clay figure baking in the sun, were cause for elation. They transmitted to each other that most rare sound of living voices mingled in song. Listening, Chandelier’s father had believed the space inside the Egg transfigured. He seemed to stand directly beneath a star-clustered dome, and the current that moved through his veins was purest longing.

But the sign for which the Arêté watched with keenest anticipation had so far eluded them. And that was birdsong. When the songbirds returned, Chandelier’s father explained, it would be safe for them to leave the Egg.

Chandelier never told his father that he found this prospect terrifying. It was one thing to study sky, ocean, mountains, and savannah on film. It was quite another to visit them.

Chandelier feared the real world might be too much for him. He feared he might fall down or go mad.

Of course, he strove to master his anxiety, and even before the explosion, it was to Snake he turned as his prime mentor who knew all about survival. Chandelier had encountered many gods and heroes and mythic beings in his books. But from their very first meeting, when Snake slithered from his secret underworld in the myths of Earth’s beginnings, Chandelier was mesmerized. The fine hair on the boy’s wrists and at the back of his neck stood erect. His entire body, his spine especially, was alert to Snake’s majesty and supple energizing power.

Coiled. Circular. An emerald zigzag. A dark bolt distinguishing earth from sky. The boy marvelled at Snake’s guile, his shape-shifting, his flickering tongue. He knew there was no situation from which Snake could not extricate himself, whether by stealth or hypnosis or darting venom. In story after story where Snake reigned, Chandelier saw a visceral truth confirmed. Here was his life’s spirit guide. He knew he would never find a better one. He read of Snake as the founder of great cities, and of the Serpent as Time itself. He saw Snake make his sinewy belly a platform to support a dancing god with eyes of fire. He saw Snake as a healer, curled round a slender staff, a counsellor to physicians through the ages.

Snake
, he implores as he runs,
please help Bird Girl
.

And he saw Snake maligned, his wisdom misconstrued in tales where he was cursed and miscast as the evil seducer of humankind. In this mistaken form, Snake was made demon and dragon, to be slain again and again by a warrior angel with trident and sword. Of course, the sinewy one did not die, no matter how often he was slain. He rose up again shining, because he was Snake.

Chandelier recognized that any willful defamations of Snake’s character only proved the paradox his father had taught him: that the sacred was also the cursed, the two aspects so entwined they made a single shape, like the old skin Snake sloughed off in resurrection. The boy looked and saw only Snake’s gleaming, benevolent, heroic self. What other being was so at ease underground, sliding along the earth’s surface, or through water? Snake was a climber too, up poles, pinnacles, and cliffs; so heights were no obstacle.

Now, as Chandelier bends double, his breath spent in pursuit of the archer who shot Bird Girl, he wishes such a saviour hero for her. She cannot die. She simply cannot. His hands are balled in fists, one of them tight round the little slab of green stone with its metal paddle which he had seized from the ruins of the Egg. It perturbs him that he still cannot remember what this object is. He has kept it safe because it belonged to his father. This fact alone makes the thing precious.

He looks around and sees the Outpacer some distance behind him, striving to catch his breath. The cowl of the man’s gown touches the earth.

“We have lost him,” the Outpacer says. “See here.” He points to a wide fissure in the earth that the boy must have passed moment ago, unseeing. “I believe this is the opening to a tunnel. There may be a whole network of channels under the earth, or perhaps this leads into the chambered caves the plague doctor spoke of.”

“And there!” The Outpacer points to his left. Chandelier has to rub his eyes before he can properly make out a peculiar dark hump. He blinks and sees that the hump has a yawning black mouth. The boy has never before seen a cave. Immediately he thinks of bears, aurochs, ossuaries, and magical pigments.

“We must hurry back.” Chandelier hears a catch in the man’s voice. Like a tear in a purse, he thinks, through which a treasure is escaping.

Do we all love Bird Girl then, the boy wonders, as they speed back. The knot in his throat keeps tightening. As he runs, he tries to summon up images of hope. He remembers pictures from his mother’s books of exquisite, flower-like faces turned skyward, and the miraculous sign that would appear, sometimes in the shape of a shaft of light or an angel. But these static images will not do for Bird Girl. He needs movement and sprightliness. He needs a landscape in which to picture her bounding and leaping about — flying even, in her exuberance.

The image that comes to him is of the hills that so often defined the horizon in the paintings of the Quattrocento his mother loved. His eye had always been drawn to those soft undulations that served to show how deep and wide the world was within the picture’s frame. Sometimes bare; sometimes dotted with slim trees, the foremost hills were crowned with purple or burnt sienna — a name, once learned, he loved to roll upon his tongue. In all those images, he had thought he perceived a slight movement. He was certain that hills embodied an actual joy. They must, he told himself, be the laughter of earth.

Since he emerged from the Egg, Chandelier had seen no hills, only flatness and forest, and the wretched Cityscape and sewer land he would prefer to forget. Hills were a wonder yet to come. I will lift up my eyes, he promised himself, and there they will be. He pictures how he and Bird Girl would make their way up to the rounded peak toward the source of that vivid colour. She would run, skip, and leap up the yielding slope. Once they reached the top, they would breathe quietly, absorbing the plenitude of space. And perhaps there, the actual shining world of myth and story would reveal itself to both of them, and Snake would show himself and speak.

Where is Snake, he wonders anxiously, as he and Outpacer plunge through the last of the brush to the place where Lucia kneels, pressing a cloth to Bird Girl’s wound. Candace stands sorrowful at Bird Girl’s feet. Harry, leaning heavily on his stick, stares down at the girl’s small face, almost unrecognizable in its waxen pallor. It seems to Chandelier that Harry’s grizzled face has noticeably sagged since the arrow struck.

“We lost the bastard,” the Outpacer whispers. Candace frowns. Harry’s mouth twists over his lower teeth.

“We have cleaned the wound and put on some ointment,” Lucia says. “Now we can only hope.” Her brow furrows under the taut band of her kerchief.

“Lola is dead,” she tells them. “She sucked out a lot of the venom before we could stop her . . . ”

The Outpacer puts a hand to his hidden face. “My God! Who else among us would have made such a sacrifice?

“The boy and I will bury Lola.”

Chandelier begins to summon his courage. He is afraid that when he touches Lola’s corpse, he will feel again the clamminess of his father’s severed hand. He wishes Snake would come, for isn’t his friend a cool and wily fellow, well acquainted with death?

Help me
.

It is then the rain begins to fall. At first the boy assumes the sizzling sound he hears behind him is the Outpacer lighting his torch. He turns round and sees a small crater in the earth from which a dense sulfurous smoke rises. He is reminded of the stink of the Egg’s smoldering remnants. His eyes begin to water and so it is through a glaze that he sees a huge drop of rust-red rain fall directly ahead of him. The instant it touches the earth, the rain burns a hole and the stench catches in his throat despite his mask.

The Outpacer has picked up Bird Girl, and is shielding her body with the skirt of his gown which he has pulled up to cover her, leaving his legs bare. “Run,” he yells. “We must take shelter. Follow me, and be quick.”

Candace is screaming. Harry is gesturing wildly, urging the boy to speed ahead after the Outpacer. Chandelier shakes his head, and seizes Harry’s hand, pulling him forward. The boy struggles to resist the terrible urge to look up. He knows that if he obeys this foolish compulsion, he may scald his face badly or even go blind. What or who is bleeding above them? Or is this Sky weeping for himself, his tears stained by the innards of the Sun?

“Go boy! Let’s get a move on.” Chandelier cannot recall Harry ever moving so quickly before, but they are still the last in the line. Lucia, who is just ahead of them, keeps looking back to make sure they have not stumbled.

The deadly drops are spaced far apart, and it is this that saves them. Plunk, the boy hears. Sizzle. Plunk and sizzle. This destructive percussion keeps them company as they run, but the sound is always a little to their left or to their right, or just behind or ahead.