The Courage Consort (23 page)

One day their mother told them a story—a true story, she insisted—about how a future would come when their bodies would change beyond recognition. Tainto'lilith would grow teats, and Marko'cain would sprout a beard.

'Oh ho!' they chortled.

But their mother's seriousness sewed a needle of anxiety through the tough skin of their hearts. From that moment on, the challenge of arresting the advance of time became a priority for Tainto'lilith and Marko'cain. The years must not be allowed to pass: they must be kept in check, securely corralled in the present. But how?

The answer must lie, the twins felt sure, in ritual—ritual being a concept that was much discussed in the Fahrenheit household, in reference to the Guhiynui. But Boris and Una were mere observers, too European to understand ritual in its visceral origins. Their black-maned, seal-eyed children were already devising a way to control the workings of the universe with such ready-to-hand materials as Arctic fox and knife.

Tainto'lilith and Marko'cain had never met the Guhiynui, but their minds seemed to work similarly—as Una always remarked whenever she saw her children setting off for some solemn ceremony, sled laden with improvised talismans, fetishes, and jujus.

'Ah, if it was
you
two trying to unlock the Guhiynui's secrets,' she'd flatter them, 'instead of old Boris, you would get results in a hurry, wouldn't you, my little angels?'

In fact, the twins were capable of great patience when it came to ritual. Certainly, like all children they were impetuous and never walked if they could run, but magic was a different thing from play. It was grand and elemental and couldn't be rushed. You could wolf your dinner or jump recklessly into the embers of a bonfire, but picking at the threads of the fabric of time required more caution.

To crack the 'teats and beard' problem, for example, Tainto'lilith and Marko'cain planned a ritual which could only be performed once a year, at that potently magical moment when the summer sun rose above the horizon at last. Shortly beforehand, they would trap a fox, and make a cage for it—well, they'd have to make the cage first, perhaps. Then they would take the fox to the horizon and fasten it in position, its head facing where the sun was going to rise. Taller than their captive, the children were sure to spot the first glow of light coming, and, just as the fox was about to see it, Marko'cain would pinion the animal's head with his knees while Tainto'lilith stabbed out itss eyes.

Afterwards, they would kill it, although this wouldn't be an essential part of the ritual—merely a gesture of mercy. And every year, they would repeat the ritual with a fresh fox, an eternally reincarnated fox that would always close its eyes rather than witness the changing of the season.

'Do you think it will work?' said Tainto'lilith.

'I'm sure of it,' Marko'cain assured her. 'I feel it in my testaments.'

Having said that, there could be no doubt.

The great house where the Fahrenheits lived stood out from the landscape like an abandoned spaceship on the moon. It was a domed monstrosity of concrete, steel, and double-glazed glass, attached umbilically to a generator and humming gently all the time. Inside, it was decorated and furnished in the schmaltziest Bavarian style, with intricately carved cuckoo clocks, chocolate-brown tables and chairs, embroidered tapestries, glass cabinets filled with miniature poppets of all nations. A massive oil painting of golden reindeer in a forest of broccoli hung above the fireplace, which was never lit because the central heating took care of all that. There was no vegetation outside anyway, so nothing to burn except (if need ever be) the furniture and the Fahrenheits' books and papers.

The kitchen was a Baroque wonderland of polished wood and brass; dozens of weirdly shaped implements and utensils hung in neat rows on the walls. Few of them were ever used. All the Fahrenheits' food came from a freezer the size of a Volkswagen, and Una boiled or baked it either in the grey pot with the cracked wooden handle or the singed pink ceramic oven dish, according to what it was. She was a pathologically forgetful cook and any meal not prepared by the children was likely to be a challenging affair, though occasionally she did get into moods when she would create elaborate pastries or even soups.

'You need vitamins, minerals, and all those mysterious little trace elements,' she would enthuse, serving each of her children some extraordinary treat on the special plates with the silver rims. 'You can't live on rubbish all the time, you know.'

The twins' bedroom was painted mauve, as a bisexual compromise between pink and blue. Very little of the walls showed through, though, because of the density of prints and bookcases and shelves piled thick with knickknacks. All these things had belonged to Una when she was a child; she had insisted on taking them with her to the island for her own personal, sentimental reasons, long before she had conceived of Tainto'lilith and Marko'cain. Over time, more and more of it was passed down to the children. Her eyes would mist over, and she would rush to fetch something from a locked cabinet or even a suitcase.

'Here, I want you to have this,' she would say, brandishing some ancient ornament or faun-coloured book. 'If you promise to take care of it.'

From careful study of these things—the little wooden horses with real manes and tails, the crystal baubles with cherubs inside, the music boxes that played Alpine melodies, the stuffed mouse with the Tyroler hat, green velvet jacket, and lederhosen—Tainto'lilith and Marko'cain pieced together an impression of who their mother might be.

Conversation was considerably harder to come by. Una addressed perhaps a hundred sentences a year to her children, or even less if repetitions weren't counted.

In view of this scarcity, the twins were compiling a 'Book of Knowledge', in which they faithfully recorded all the things their mother said to them. Not the halfhearted scoldings or the offhand domestic instructions, but anything more pregnant. The book—a hundred or so blank pages bound in stiff, intricately patterned covers—was a sacred object and mistakes were not allowed. Every word, every letter proposed for inclusion in it was discussed by the twins beforehand, practised on scrap paper, then inscribed onto the creamy white pages with great care. Appropriately enough, the first thing written into the book was what their mother had told them about the book itself when she'd presented it to them.

'This book was once a tree.'

It was an intriguing thought. The Fahrenheits' house was infested with paper—hardbound texts, maps, German romances, very old newspapers, glossy magazines flown in from Canada, plus, of course, Boris and Una's own mountains of notes and journals. All these, if mother was to be believed, had once been trees. The notion was doubly potent because the children had never seen a tree, except in books.

Their own attempt to grow such a miraculous thing for themselves, by pulping a book into paste and burying it in a compost of excrement and yeast, had not been successful.

Disappointed, they'd worked up the courage to knock at their mother's study, to ask her the exact recipe for trees.

'Not now, darlings,' she warned them, leaning farther into the pearly light of her desk lamp.

One day, Boris and Una Fahrenheit returned from yet another visit to the Guhiynui, landing their grimy blue-and-silver helicopter just outside the house as usual. From the dining-room window, through the trickling shimmer of condensation, Tainto'lilith and Marko'cain watched them disembark. Four cuckoo clocks, in various rooms of the house, started cooing simultaneously. In the snows outside, a chaos of huskies swirled around the returning grown-ups, barking and snuffling.

It was obvious, even before Boris and Una reached the front door, that they were in an unusually subdued mood. They were neither arguing like bitter enemies nor (as was equally common) discussing their findings like affectionate colleagues on the brink of a breakthrough. Instead, Una walked into the house silent and pale, pausing only to let her coat fall to the floor before disappearing into the bedroom.

Boris, a few steps behind, followed her to the bedroom door, then thought better of it. He left the house again, and busied himself putting the helicopter away. Tainto'lilith and Marko'cain watched him through the glass, wiping the condensation away with their pyjama'd elbows,
pwoot woot woot.

Eventually their father was ready to give them an explanation.

'Your mother has eaten something that disagreed with her,' he said. 'Don't be surprised if this ends badly.'

This was the sum of his thoughts on the matter, but it was enough to galvanise the twins into action.

For the next three days, Tainto'lilith and Marko'cain put aside all childish things in order to nurse their mother in her bed. Holding back offers of nurture only during those arbitrary hours of 'night' when their parents were actually sleeping together, they devoted every remaining minute to a routine of snacks, cold compresses, warm towels, fizzy pills, and hot-water bottles.

'Oh, you are such little darlings,' Una beamed at them, her face glowing like a gas flame. 'My own mother couldn't have nursed me better than you two are doing.'

Pride in this distinction didn't blind the twins to the fearsome obstinacy of their mother's illness. As the days passed, they grew stoical in their acceptance of the prophesied 'bad end,' which in their minds was their mother having to be transported hundreds of miles to the nearest hospital.

Instead, she died.

Bringing the breakfast as usual, the twins found their father loitering outside her bedroom, fully dressed.

'She's dead,' he said, then smiled a ghastly smile as if trying to reassure them that he would not let a thing like this cast a shadow over their welfare.

'But we have her breakfast,' said Tainto'lilith.

'It's all right, you weren't to know,' said Boris.

Seeing that the twins were not taking his word for it, he stepped aside to let them into the bedroom where, at some uncertain time during the night, his wife had finally left him. The event seemed to have rendered him oddly lenient, almost tender.

Tainto'lilith put down the tray of tea and oatmeal just outside the door and followed her brother in. Una Fahrenheit was lying horizontal in the bed, sheets pulled up to her chin. Her flesh was the colour of peeled apple. Her mouth hung slackly open, her eyes were only half shut. There was nothing happening inside her skull; it was deserted.

Boris stood in the doorway, arms loosely folded, waiting for Una's children to confirm the correctness of his judgment.

Tainto'lilith and Marko'cain dawdled around the bed, sobbing and snivelling softly. Then, briefly, they wailed. In time, they stopped moving and made a little space for themselves on the edge of the mattress next to their mother's body. They sat there, shoulder to shoulder, breathing in turns. Outside the bedroom, the tongues of dogs slurped at oatmeal and cold tea.

'What happens to her now?' Marko'cain asked the shadowy figure in the doorway.

'Burial,' said their father. 'Or cremation.'

'Oh,' said Marko'cain. He was thinking angels might still come down from the snowy sky and scoop his mother's body up to heaven. Hidden somewhere far beyond the featureless gloom of the polar atmosphere, there might be an exotic paradise of teak and lace, laid out ready for Una Fahrenheit. Perhaps only the reinforced concrete of the ceiling was keeping the angels from getting in.

'I'll leave the final decision to you,' said Boris, with a heavy sigh. 'Don't think too long about it, though.'

Left alone with their thoughts, Tainto'lilith and Marko'-cain wept a little longer, then began to plan for the future.

They were angry, of course, that the opportunity of saving their mother had not been offered them. Had they seriously imagined she might die, they would certainly have done something to stop it. The universe was not above agreeing to bargains of various kinds, providing enough advance warning was given.

But she was dead now, and that was that.

'We are orphans now, like in the storybook of
Little Helmut and Marlene,
' suggested Tainto'lilith.

'Well … not really,' frowned Marko'cain. 'We have a father.'

'For how much longer?'

'He looks quite well.'

'That's not what I meant.'

'You think he will leave us now that mother is gone?'

'It's possible,' said Tainto'lilith.

'Ours is the only house on the island,' objected Marko'cain.

'He may go and live with the Guhiynui. He knows them a lot better than us, and some of them are bound to be women.'

Marko'cain considered this for a minute, then said, 'We are talking about the wrong things.'

Behind them on the bed, the body of their mother was waiting.

'True,' said Tainto'lilith.

The important question was, what ritual would be the right one for their mother—not simply in the matter of removing her body, but also in commemorating all she had been in spirit. She was, after all, no mere piece of refuse to be disposed of.

'We buried Snuffel,' recalled Marko'cain. Snuffel was the children's pet name for Schnauffel, one of the huskies who had died a couple of years before. They had buried him near the generator, in the lush soft earth surrounding the hot-water pipes. An elaborate ceremony had accompanied the burial, involving recitations, toys, and raw meat.

'Snuffel was a dog,' said Tainto'lilith. 'Our mother isn't a dog.'

'I'm not saying we should do it exactly the same. But we could bury her along with her favourite things.'

'She would hate to have her things buried. Whenever she gave us something, she was always upset if we got it dirty.'

'But won't she be in a box?'

'I don't know. Father didn't say anything about a box. And you remember when we asked about making the fox cage, he said he had no wood to waste on such foolishness.'

Marko'cain sat slumped in thought. Outside the door, the dogs' tongues stopped lapping and their soft clicking footfalls faded away. These things and more were made audible by the silence of their mother on the bed behind them.