The Demi-Monde: Summer (19 page)

Life with the rest of the Empress’s concubines in the Pavilion of Delicious Delights was not one that Dong E found conducive to private study and reflection. Every moment of every day was confined and encoded by Li. Li informed them what it was appropriate to wear, which songs it was most propitious to sing, and which board games it was permitted to play. Li told them when to wash, when to eat, when to rest … everything. And to ensure that Li was meticulously adhered to, there was always
the hateful presence of NoN Mao ZeDong noting and punishing every indiscretion and every violation of protocol committed by the Fresh Blooms.

In this monitoring Mao was enthusiastically aided and abetted by Noble Consort Yu Lang, the most senior of all the Empress’s concubines and hence her favourite, and being the favourite, she was permanently worried that her position would one day be usurped by a younger and fresher rival. She was suspicious of any Fresh Bloom who seemed to be finding favour with the Empress and hence Dong E’s invitation to attend the Rite of 4Telling had been very badly received.

The interrogation commenced immediately Dong E returned from her adventure in the Gallery of Literary Profundity. ‘You were summoned to an audience in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, Fresh Bloom Dong E. This is a rare honour for one so low. Come, tell me what occurred.’

Dong E bowed. ‘You must forgive me, Noble Consort Yu Lang, but I have been pressed most earnestly by Her Majesty to remain silent regarding what I saw and heard in her presence.’

Yu Lang bridled and slapped her fan angrily onto the palm of her hand. She beckoned to her GuardianNoN, the repulsive Wang Jingwei. ‘NoN Wang Jingwei, this nothing of a Fresh Bloom refuses to divulge what happened this morning when she was called to the Hall of Supreme Harmony. Have you ever heard such insolence?’

The fat NoN shook his head so hard that his jowls wobbled. ‘Never! It is the duty of all Fresh Blooms to be obedient to those placed above them and, if I may say so, there are none more elevated in the Imperial Seraglio than yourself, Noble Consort Yu.’

Servile bastard
.

‘Come, no more of this nonsense, Fresh Bloom Dong E, tell Noble Consort Yu Lang what transpired this morning.’

Again Dong E bowed. ‘With the deepest and most profound regret, Revered GuardianNoN Wang Jingwei, I must decline to tell you. I am bound by oath to remain silent on these matters. It grieves me most earnestly to refuse your commands, but my pledge to Her Imperial Majesty cannot be denied.’

They beat her. Using a cane, they beat her. But no matter how hard they slashed it across her bottom, she refused to speak and eventually Wang Jingwei called a halt – obviously concerned about the trouble there would be if the Empress called for Dong E that night and she was unable to walk – and he and Yu Lang left her sobbing and alone locked in an ante room with only a candle for company.

Which was what Dong E had planned all along.

As soon as she heard the key turn in the lock, Dong E stopped crying, dried her eyes and took a few moments to regain her composure. She had deliberately antagonised Yu Lang knowing that as punishment she would be condemned to a couple of hours of solitary confinement, and this, she had learnt, was the only way she could achieve privacy. She retrieved the sheets of paper Xi Kang had given her from where they were hidden down the back of her kimono – where their presence had saved her from the worst of the caning – and settled back to read.

Then, just as quickly, stopped reading.

No wonder
Daemons, Messiahs and Other ABBArational Beliefs
was a banned book. In the first few lines Xi Kang denied the existence of ABBA, and as this, in turn, denied the divinity of Empress Wu it was an opinion that was punishable by death. To be caught reading such seditious material would lead to a very swift and very painful Plucking. Dong E took a quick – and totally unnecessary – look around the room before allowing curiosity to drag her eyes back to the page.

She read for ten minutes and the more she read the more she came to understand why Xi Kang – TooZian radical that he
was – had been banished to the Gallery of Literary Profundity, especially when he opined that
once the amount of Qi within the Demi-Monde rises to a Critical Level (nineteen years from now in the year 1005 AC)
…

This year!

…
then the world will self-destruct in an orgy of violence, an event which I named the Big Bang
…
or, as those of a religious bent prefer to call it, Ragnarok. A study of the religious tracts indicates that Ragnarok will signal a shift from Yin/Yang dualism to a merging of Yin and Yang, creating a harmonised Demi-Monde suffused with Ying. It will be at this moment when the Messiah – whose manifestation is foretold in all Demi-Mondian religions – will arrive to lead the faithful to ABBAsoluteness
.

This was sacrilege of the most pernicious kind. It was the bedrock of HerEticalism that the Demi-Monde was about to enter the Second Age of the Femmes, the Millennium when Femmes would achieve mastery – MISStery – of the world and nonFemmes, with their passion for violence and mayhem, would be removed from power. But what Xi Kang was suggesting was that there was another interpretation of the movement of the Kosmos, that the Age to come was not one dominated by Yin – the female essence – but one that would usher in the Time of Perfect Harmony, of Ying, the elegant and perfect merging of the female and the male essences, the combining of Yin
and
of Yang. And again Dong E was struck by the similarity this concept had with Normalism, the non-violent creed of the Daemon Norma Williams.

Worse was to come with Xi Kang arguing that there would be a Messiah sent by ABBA to lead the people of the Demi-Monde to ABBAsoluteness … to oneness with ABBA. Again this was a disturbingly heretical suggestion. Whilst the coming of a Messiah was fundamental to many of the religions of the Demi-Monde, it was strenuously denied by HerEticalism. How could
it be, HerEticalism asked, that ABBA would need to send a Messiah to the Demi-Monde when She already had a representative in this world in the guise of the ABBA-blessed Empress Wu? It was Empress Wu, all Covenites were taught, who was the Messiah. It was she who would bring Femmes to the precious state of MostBien and who would drive MALEvolence from the world.

But if Dong E was to believe Xi Kang, the message was clear: the Messiah would be a Daemon … just like this Norma Williams.

Astonishing though this was, it was a paragraph towards the end of the extract that turned her astonishment into incredulity.

It is the struggle between the Messiah and the Beast that forms the basis for the Final Conflict. But the Messiah will not fight alone, having the help of PaPa Legba (sometimes called the Trickster, or the Wily Fox), the Warrior (sometimes called the Battle-Maiden or grim Surt) and, finally, the Fresh Bloom, destined by Fate and her Ancestors to come to the Messiah’s aid when all have deserted her.

A Fresh Bloom was destined by Fate to come to the Messiah’s aid!

For a moment Dong E sat stunned. Then she checked the imprint date shown on the fly of the mutilated book. The book had been printed long before she had come to the Forbidding City, long before she had been named a Fresh Bloom. It was a strange and a very upsetting coincidence.

Dong E sat for long minutes in silent consideration of what she had read trying to attain
wu wei
. Once she had accomplished this she delved into her pocket and drew out the three coins she used when consulting the iChing, settled her body and mind, voiced her question –
What is to be my role with regard to the Daemon?
– and then with a dexterity honed by much practice threw the three coins nine times.

The NonaGram created gave her considerable pause. Like all
Fresh Blooms, she had committed the five hundred and twelve Epigrams of the iChing to memory so she knew what the sixty-sixth one said, and as she sat in that dark and dank room, she felt the heavy hand of Fate on her shoulder. Now she understood that she was the girl destined to save the Messiah.

So like an island

Alone in a raging sea
,

Like a lamp

Shining in the darkest night
,

So Good must resist Evil
.

Know you this:

To deny is to surrender
,

To kowtow is to submit
,

You, the Superior Soul, must Stand
.

‘Why me?’

‘Why not?’ countered Xi Kang.

‘But I’m a nothing. I’m just a Fresh Bloom and a not very important Fresh Bloom at that.’

‘ABBA moves in mysterious ways.’ Xi Kang stopped himself. ‘Bollocks, I must be going senile. We TooZians don’t believe in ABBA so it’s impossible for Her – or perhaps Him – to move at all. So let’s just say that you have been ordained by Fate to do this great task.’

‘That’s a cop-out: Fate is just another name for ABBA.’

Xi Kang took another long gulp from the bottle of Solution Dong E had brought as a gift. ‘You got me there. I always thought the Master, when he was writing the BiAlects, never really had his heart in it when he was composing the parts relating to the non-existence of ABBA. What did you think of my book?’

‘Disturbing … infuriating.’

‘Excellent! I have always been of the opinion that a book that
doesn’t infuriate at least half of its readers isn’t a book at all, it’s a brochure. So which bits did you find especially troublesome?’

‘Well … the part that says a Fresh Bloom will come to the Messiah’s aid when all have deserted her. Is my Celestial name really used in ancient mythology?’

‘Frequently.’

‘It might be just a coincidence.’

‘Could be, but somehow I don’t think so. Rather I’m inclined to think a prophecy made at a distance of two thousand years that turns out to be true smacks of divine guidance … fuck … smacks of Fate. It seems, my deliciously beautiful wanton, that you have a great role to play in deciding the destiny of the Messiah and hence of the Demi-Monde.’

‘And it
is
the Daemon who is the Messiah?’

‘That’s what the iChing says.’

‘Well, it’s one thing to be tasked with saving the Messiah, it’s quite another to actually do it. She’s being kept incommunicado in an apartment in the Pavilion of Silent Repose, an apartment guarded twenty-four hours a day by GuardNoNs.’

Xi Kang shrugged. ‘And now we come to the payment I can demand for providing you with the insight into the Changes. This Daemon, after all, has got to eat and to have her laundry done, and you are a very pretty
little
trollop …’

‘I wish to see the Column.’

Nikolai Kondratieff bowed, using it as a means of hiding the apprehension he felt sure was reflected on his face. The sudden appearance of the Marquis de Sade – or, as he was now,
Senior Prelate
de Sade – was a disturbing event. But what made his
appearance all the more disconcerting was that he was accompanied by Grand Vizier Selim the Grim and Doge IMmanual’s twin brother, Duke William, both of whom, if the scuttlebutt was to be believed, were mad, bad and dangerous to know.

Having met Selim before at the unveiling of the Column, Kondratieff was prepared for how intimidating the man was but nothing could have prepared him for how threatened he felt to be in the presence of Duke William. The boy brought the darkness with him.

Duke William looked just as Kondratieff imagined he would: big and brutal. He was tall, like his sister, and very powerfully built, his jacket struggling to contain his broad shoulders. But it wasn’t his size that so alarmed Kondratieff; it was the fact that the boy seemed to be a mass of twitches and tics. His feet were incessantly tap, tap, tapping on the floor, his hands were continually touching and teasing his elaborate coiffure and his left eye was beset by a nervous tremor. He gave the impression that he was having the greatest of difficulty containing his passions … that he was borderline out of control. Kondratieff knew instinctively that he was a Dark Charismatic … an InDeterminate and very evil force of Nature.

This was the swine who had caused Kondratieff to order the running of the Future History Institute’s Data Analysis and Evaluation machinery – the DAEmon – day and night for the last week as he tried desperately to assess the impact the boy’s sudden appearance in the Demi-Monde would have on the future. And the results had all been bad. Whilst Kondratieff was confident – well, relatively confident – that the Temporal Modulations he and de Nostredame had been making would prevent Doge IMmanual from achieving mastery of the Demi-Monde, her brother’s unexpected manifestation had thrown these plans into disarray. Now it was time for desperate measures.

‘That will be my pleasure, Your Holiness … Your Highness
… Your Grace,’ Kondratieff smarmed, masking his feelings of disgust with a smile. ‘It is not often that the Galerie des Anciens is graced by the presence of three such noble visitors.’ He did his best to keep even the merest hint of sarcasm from inflecting his voice, but it was difficult. Only a few weeks ago de Sade had been one of the most detested men in the whole of Venice and now here he was, strutting around as one of its most important personages. Only a few weeks ago Selim had been one of the most feared enemies of Venice and now here he was, promenading around as though he was thinking of buying the city. And, if the rumours circulating Venice were correct, such were Duke William’s perverse appetites that his natural habitat was deep in the sewers of civilisation.