The Modern World (53 page)

I studied the panels in the stucco ceiling, Mica valley landscapes rendered in oils, more mannered and pastel-toned than the dramatic colours of real life. The same iconic images over and over, and yet
again in the ceramic and champlevé enamel vases on the delicate side tables – maybe that’s the brake of Lightning’s patronage. I picked at my chair’s lavish cushioned seat, slowly creating and unravelling a loose thread. I marked imaginary lines in the rock crystal carafe of vintage port before me as I worked my way down it.

Over each lintel around the room were lunette paintings of Lightning’s other properties. I could see through the nearest door, down a short corridor lined with small bronzes, toxophilous or booted and spurred for the charge, a sinuous ormolu clock, a walnut escritoire, and through to the Great Dining Hall.

Its doorway was crowned with his coat of arms in marble marquetry, plain, veined or flecked, each from a different part of the manor, surrounded by cipolin stone wreaths symbolising the Donaise Hills. Servants were clearing away the untouched feast from the huge table and, high above them at the end of the hall, portière curtains concealed a musicians’ gallery.

I lost track of time; it certainly felt like we had been here for hours, exchanging only pleasantries, all tacitly waiting for some kind of explanation from Lightning while he pretended not to notice. I shifted position and flapped my wings open. I scuffed the carpet with my feet; I wanted to run and shout to break the tension. I considered going for a flight to blow away the fevered stuffiness of the room.

Lightning suddenly changed the music to an expansive waltz and looked at me steadily. ‘No, I’m not disappointed with the world. I’m not tired, just bemused. I want to find out more and I need time to think.’

Finally! ‘Is it to do with what the Emperor told you, when you had dinner with him?’

‘Yes, tell us what he said. We all want to know,’ said Eleonora, leaning forward on the balcony railing.

Lightning paused, then smiled. ‘He said that you would certainly ask about it, and he would prefer it if I didn’t tell you.’

‘I’ll ask him myself.’

‘Comet, you know very well San keeps his past a secret.’

‘He told you his past?’

‘Yes. The Emperor explained it to me. He told me about the Shift as well. The things he said are just so incredible … I need time to come to terms with them. He only told me because he realised, at that point on the battlefield, that I didn’t need immortality any more. He realised I had grown out of it.’

Tern spoke up from the window seat, unable to keep the sour note from her voice: ‘Did he know you would throw the competition?’

‘I expect he considered it. He knew I was leaving.’

‘Didn’t he ask you not to?’ she urged.

He laughed. ‘San has known Rayne and I a long time, longer than anyone else in his life. He might only speak to us once a decade, but I suppose that’s as close as he gets, to friends. He knows Ella and I well, and he didn’t find this too hard to predict. San relies on people wanting to be immortal more than anything else in the world, but if one of us Eszai finds something he wants more than immortality, San can do nothing to keep him. Ten years ago, when Cyan was kidnapped by Shearwater and I set off to rescue her, I must have valued her more than immortality, subconsciously I suppose. I mean, I wasn’t aware of it at the time. So, no … I am free to change, now. I am free to understand your other worlds, feel the passing of time again.’

‘Well, aren’t you afraid of dying?’ Tern demanded.

Lightning lapsed into silence again. He played a little more loudly for a while, until a crunch on the gravel drive outside interrupted him.

‘A little coach is coming in!’ Tern cried.

‘Is it? What are its colours?’

‘Green and grey.’

Lightning stopped playing. ‘Green and grey is Awndyn.’

The coach slewed to a halt. In the light from the palace lamps we saw the two horses were frothing. A plump woman in a shapeless silk dress and long ginger hair, leaning on a stick and moving slowly, swayed out of the carriage, ascended the steps and disappeared into the portico.

We heard her footsteps resound loud on the Reception Hall’s terrazzo floor, then soundless as she passed into the carpeted winter south wing, through the salon and study. The door flew open and Swallow Awndyn barged in. A servant was following worriedly, close behind her. She slammed the door on him and glared at us all.

Lightning stood up. ‘Welcome!’

His fiancée took a fistful of her hair and pulled at it in fury. ‘What happened – Lightning? Have I heard right? You lost a Challenge? To your vile squab?’

‘So it seems.’ He relaxed back onto the piano stool. ‘I’m sorry you missed it, my love. I sent you an invitation.’

‘
You stupid moron!
’

Lightning quoted mildly: ‘I love my love with an S, because she suddenly shows a slanderous side. Her name is Swallow and she comes from the strand.’

‘I came straight here when I heard!’ She ground her walking stick
into the carpet. ‘I can’t believe it! You
never
lose! I never thought I’d live to see it! I can’t even imagine it!’

Lightning offered her a glass but she didn’t register it. She was incredulous. ‘I expected to see you dejected, and here you are slamming at the piano like ten madmen. Are you insane?’

‘That is no way to speak to your betrothèd.’

‘All my life I’ve been fighting to get into the Circle and you just throw it away! Like it’s nothing! Throw your life to a stupid child like a bauble!’

‘The surprise should improve your music. It has become a bit samey over the last few years.’

‘You!’ She was speechless, and she still wouldn’t sit down. ‘How dare you!’

‘Answer me this first – do you still want to marry me?’

‘But … you’re a loser. You lost.’

Lightning closed his eyes for a second. Swallow continued, ‘You’re going to become mortal. To get older!’

‘So you don’t want me now?’

She hesitated and Lightning continued artlessly, ‘So you were interested in me for my immortality, rather than as a person?’

She looked to the books portrayed in the lush weave of the carpet and the cascades of fruit in the deep wood mouldings on the door jambs. She ground the heel of one hand into her eye. Her red wings opened slightly, pulling her gown tight across her front; she was as flat-chested as a narrow boat. Her face had become lined, and she had plucked her eyebrows into an expression of constant surprise.

Swallow was the best musician of all time, but the Emperor did not need a musician. He didn’t need music to rally the fyrd when everyone agreed Insects must be fought. He didn’t need music for propaganda when he was offering immortality. She hated the fact that the sole determiner of the value of anything was its usefulness in the Insect war. After fifteen years of the same ambitious refrain the pressure had made her diamond inside, but she wasn’t sparkling, however emptily. She was cutting.

‘I want to join the
Circle
,’ she said. ‘How can you help me now? I
am
a musician. It’s
all
I do. Just like an Eszai.’

Lightning leant back, his elbow on the piano’s music stand. ‘Oh, Swallow,’ he said. ‘You never noticed for one second that I really adored you. But now I’m leaving the Circle you suddenly see me. For ten years I have been offering you a place in the Circle through my love and you were too proud to take it. Do you think I can’t tell, after hundreds of years of fending off gold-diggers? You strung me along –
with your pride you believed you could make it into the Circle on your own merit and I was your back-up plan. Even if you had become Eszai, you still wouldn’t have married me, because deep down you don’t want to. I was just as wrong to court you, but I didn’t want to admit it, because I thought you were like Martyn –’ He looked momentarily surprised at himself. ‘But you are not. Now you are showing your true colours.’

‘Ha! At least I still have feelings, not like you, always controlled, living in this fucking art gallery; you’re so transparent.’

‘On the contrary, you barely noticed I existed. I wondered what I had to do. If you had wanted Donaise you could have had it. I would have done anything. Now it’s too late.’

She said, ‘You’re always deluding yourself. You with love, Jant with drugs; god knows what the rest of the immortals rely on. In a few years you won’t be able to draw any of your wonderful bows any longer because you’ll be
old
and
weak
.’

‘I am sure it will be an interesting experience,’ he said brightly. ‘I never considered what I would look like when I’m forty. Or sixty. Well, now I’m going to find out.’

Swallow couldn’t stand the fact that he was looking on it as an interesting experiment. ‘You’re a fool! And I’ve been looking after your nasty daughter all this time! I wish I’d known!’

‘Be quiet about Cyan. I
have
just given my life for her. I only regret I didn’t do it earlier, so I could have been with her as she grew up. I should have raised her instead of you.’

Swallow exploded with fresh anger. ‘And now you’re leaving me – where? Your bastard games will have wasted my talent! One day I’ll be just a faded memory to you Eszai – worse still! – an old governor! And you won’t hear my music any more.’

Lightning smiled and glanced away. He reached around with one hand and pressed a couple of keys, twiddling the first bars of a piece of music. Swallow stopped dead. ‘Don’t you
dare
play my aria.’

Lightning brought his other hand into play and expanded the music to its full glory.

‘Stop it!’

He had turned back to the keyboard. ‘What, this? You make your own immortality with every effortless opera. You are the greatest composer in the world, Swallow. What do you really want? Immortality might not give you what you really want. It didn’t for me. Ask yourself, and be true to yourself. You already have fame. You have recognition. Your music brings a great response and many friends. But you harp on the same old tune of wanting the Circle. You don’t
appreciate the magnitude of your achievements, you only see the things you haven’t done.’

‘It isn’t good enough, if I’m still mortal. I don’t want to die.’

‘Everybody dies except San. Eszai just take longer. Why should you be saved?’

‘If I can make music forever, I’ll be happy.’

‘No, Swallow. Immortals are those who prize success and fame over happiness. They gain what little happiness they ever have from success. Their thirst for perfection and fear of being beaten drives them on. I no longer prize immortality in those terms, and neither should you. Learn from my example. Escape. You don’t have to forgo an Eszai’s single-mindedness. I won’t let anything get in my way, even though the obstacle in my path was immortality itself.’

Swallow made a sound of disgust. She pulled off her engagement ring and flung it in rage. It hit the inside of the piano’s upraised lid, dropped onto the strings and we heard it chime.

‘I did love you, Swallow.’

‘Liar!’ she screamed. She turned to me. ‘Jant, you’ll help me, won’t you?’

‘All I can, but I doubt it’ll do any good. It’s up to you, now.’

‘You said I was like a sister!’

‘I can’t change the Castle, Swallow.’

She bowed her head and sighed. ‘I sometimes feel that I’m on the edge of some great truth. I get excited. I start scrawling the notes on the manuscript. I see the glow, the edge of the bright light where genius resides. I can never reach it completely. Maybe my excitement makes it ebb. The intense white light retreats, eludes me. I grow cold. I am left on the shore. No genius breakthrough tonight, just another symphony finished and my eyes are sore. It is happening more and more these days. I am getting older, and I no longer write from the heart. I’m getting older, Jant, and I will lose my genius. I’m still running the race; time is still burning down the bridges to things I could have achieved.’ She burst into frightened tears.

‘None of us can change the Castle,’ I repeated.

‘You immortals only exist because we allow you to,’ she sobbed. ‘If you’re a … barrier to me … I’ll make your life hard in the real world.’

Eleonora cut in, with a voice used to command battles and law courts. ‘Spare us the vulgar threats,
Governor
Awndyn. There are not even a hundred immortals and you had one more chance to join them than the rest of us. You held out for yet another and lost both. Return to your music. We look forward to your next concert.’

Swallow swept the room with a look of pure hatred, took a step
forward, hesitated, turned on her heel and stormed out. Her progress down the passageway was marked by a vase smashing every few metres. A little while later we heard the clop and crunch as her coach departed at a gallop. Silence returned.

Lightning sighed. ‘I’d just had those replaced. The third time.’

I smiled. ‘Well I’m sure you can afford to have them repaired. Or make some new replicas.’

‘I don’t think I’ll bother this time. Time for a new look.’

‘Lightning, are you sure?’

‘Never more so. And you will all have to get used to calling me Saker.’

‘I think people will still call you Lightning,’ Eleonora said. ‘And Lightning, I
do
want to escape.’