Theatre of the Gods (6 page)

Then, silence. Our friends had almost made it to the front entrance.

‘So we caught you after all,’ said Fabrigas. They could hear the sounds of groaning and weeping bandits from all directions. The Necronaut took a glance through the door which led to a small reception area at the front of the bordello where customers arrived to ask questions like: ‘Do you charge by the minute?’ and ‘How much if both women are dressed as mermaids?’ He observed a bandit who had broken through the front door and been swept up in a net. They heard Nezquix’s amplified voice from outside: ‘Pilot called the Necronaut. This is Captain Nezquix of procurement. We have you sealed and surrounded. Surrender immediately to us and declare your capture!’ Lambestyo considered the captain’s words with a nod. Then he took the small WD40-X cannonball from his coat, tossed it into the reception area, and yelled, ‘Grenade! Prepare to die!’

It is not certain whether the murderous bandit who hung above the enquiries counter, knowing that this grenade was activated by contact with liquids, would have been able to hold his bladder. We will never know, and it is moot, Jessie, for he did not. His stream of fearful piss set off a chain reaction which sent the entire front edifice of this fake bordello smashing down like a drawbridge gate. Fabrigas and the young pilot both ducked for cover as the blast sent a typhoon of smoke and ash back through the corridors. The two men came together where the reception room had been, staring out into a wide market plaza where scores of women were weaving nets. They heard Nezquix’s hailer squall to life: ‘All hands, get him!’ and the women rose as one to shriek and howl like a tribe of monkeys, pointing long, metal fingers. ‘Not so crazy now, am I?’ said Lambestyo. Then this strange and indomitable boy stalked out into the plaza, back into the chaos, skipping easily away from a trapdoor as it opened, ducking another storm of flying bolas. For Fabrigas, time slowed, as it is inclined to do in serious spots, and the grubby, fleshy mouths of the weaving women seemed as big as caves. Fabrigas could see everything with perfect clarity: a horde of navy agents storming from the shadows with hefty procurement clubs, and still more bandits arriving, attracted by the chaos, swinging down from above on ropes and hooks. ‘Not so crazy now, am I?’ The words echoed in his mind as Carlos Lambestyo, a dagger in each hand, caught bandits with his blades while they were still off balance, and sent agents flying back into the shadows with the soles of his boots. Fabrigas saw the faces of bandits snatched in a moment of utter disbelief – the look you have when the victory you thought was certain vanishes, when the dark mix of blood and oil begins to ooze between your fingers and the world becomes cloudy. But still they kept coming, swinging from the gloomy heights, others coming up as fast as spiders from below, their black, shiny faces set in grimaces, oily knives clamped firmly in their teeth. Carnassus is a great cage which holds the most terrifying and merciless creatures. Once they smell blood they come from everywhere.

‘There’s too many!’ cried Nezquix. ‘Retreat! Retreat! They can have the pilot!’

Lambestyo flung both his knives and two more bandits slammed into the deck. Then he pulled a cannon pistol from its holster. He picked one bandit from the air just as he swung towards Fabrigas – the goon’s black guts exploded with the force of the round and splattered the old man’s cloak. The boy aimed his second shot at one of the struts that held the catwalks up. He never even flinched as a mountain of steel and bodies came crashing down around them with a thunder that could have roused the gods.

‘That noise should wake all the other pirates,’ said Carrofax.

‘PLEASE NOTE THAT FIREARMS ARE NOT TO BE DISCHARGED WITHIN THE AIRPORT,’ said the voice across the public address system, ‘EXCEPT BY QUALIFIED SECURITY STAFF AND AIR MARSHALS.’

Lambestyo smashed open an airport guardhouse where a lone officer was sleeping through the utter carnage around him. He picked up a heavy sonic cannon used to destroy abandoned luggage, kicked the oily filth from the barrel with the heel of his boot, dropped the priming trigger with his thumb. He hoisted the weapon over his shoulder by the leather strap and pointed it at the door to a biscuit factory. The door splintered into a cloud of pieces, a jet of hot and deliciously scented air came streaming out. The boy put his arm up to his face, his eyes burned orange as he leaped into the smoke and heat. Dancing along a narrow catwalk between a row of great ovens where ship’s biscuits were made they felt their eyebrows sizzle, and the children below briefly stopped their singing. A sea of grubby faces turned up as they passed overhead. Behind, two bandits screamed shrilly as their synthetic faces melted off in gooey lumps.

Then out and into the steaming coldness of the fish markets. The Necronaut slung the compact cannon around his back, patted himself down, realising he’d flung his last dagger. He broke the razor-sharp prow from a bladefish, swished it twice through the air. And still the bandits came thick from the shadows
. The boy cleared a path with his sonic cannon. The sound of exploding sailors brought haunted faces to the windows of the morphium dens. The trio made it halfway through the market before the baggage cannon’s charge ran out and they were completely surrounded. Fabrigas saw piles of sea creatures: red, yellow, orange, purple, high and rounded like drifts of brightly coloured snow. He saw the starfish in a heap. He saw the startled vendors, the frightened children. He saw the bandits, now numbering at least a hundred, close around them, tattoos flexing on the islands of flesh left on their steel bones. They showed their teeth – iron, bone, and filed sharp. All the navy agents had vanished, there was no one there to help them now. He saw the Necronaut stand tall and say, in a voice a notch too shrill to be forbidding, ‘Begone, dogs!’ He saw the murderous sailors roar and roll their shaggy heads. Fabrigas saw it all. He was falling through space, the world was dropping away beneath him. Then, just as the men raised their curved swords to strike Lambestyo down, the old man stepped forward, and the universe shrunk to a burning white point, a shimmering diamond in which everything was contained and anything was possible. He saw it all: he saw his mother, he saw his room. He saw a ship. He saw bloodshed. Mayhem. Plague and starvation, the fire and the flesh. In a flash he saw it all: the city, the prison, the general, the cannon’s mouth. He went tumbling back into the terrible black maw of infinity.

A SHORT INTERLUDE

We never did finish the story of how M. Francisco Fabrigas cheated death at the cannon’s mouth.

He was really just a boy himself at that time. A boy in a foreign empire a long way from home.

Fabrigas
had
known that the cannon would misfire, killing the firing squad, the general, the spectators, the scarlet bird with her newborn chicks in the tree above, but leaving him alive. He
had
wriggled from his blindfold and announced their imminent dismemberment. The cannon trick was certainly not magic. As he’d stood, blind, he’d felt the burning sun on his face and a frail breeze fondling his hair. Within the red rag around his head he’d heard, with delight, that the eggs in the tree near his balcony had finally hatched, and that the new chicks were crying out for food. He could hear the calls and chants in the market far away. He could also hear the cannon being mounted and pointed towards his chest, he could hear his own heart, the blood surging through his ears, he could hear the ball filled with shot roll along the barrel and stop with a dull
thunk
, and he could hear, with those well-trained ears, that the young soldier in charge of the gun had used the wrong gauge shot. The cannon was jammed. And so he’d struggled into the light to tell the general, proudly, but politely, that if he fired his cannon it would explode and kill them all. The assembled soldiers had laughed and General Ahksant had snorted like a bull. ‘Boy! You can only delay
for so long! Then, ka-boom-ba! No more!’ But when the long-beaked general levered at the waist, monocle raised, to check his gun, he found to his delight and dismay that Fabrigas was right! The general fell to his knees and wept. Then he untied Fabrigas, swept the grey dust from his shoulder with his own kerchief. He not only forgave him for making out with his wife, but also convinced his emperor to make him Philosopher General. The people had cheered, the new birds had cheeped. And that’s how Fabrigas became a famous wizard.

Wizard.

It wasn’t long before the story of the firing squad, as well as many other fantastical rumours, got back to the Holy Neon Empire. By the time he said farewell to the general (and his wife) he was a celebrity. His fame took him to extraordinary parties, brought him exotic gifts from beautiful starlets, saw him reading his dramatic adventure stories to radio audiences numbering in the billions, even granted him an audience with the Queen. To his horror the Queen made him Magician Incarnate of her court. ‘I would rather
die
!’ he would whisper later to his loyal servant, Carrofax. His great deeds took him to the height of stardom, and the depths of despair.

Even on the night of his release he had not rested like a happy man. He slept feverishly, like a man withdrawing from a morphium habit. He’d dreamed that on another identical planet there was an exact copy of him who had not heard the sounds, and had been shot; and on another world a merciless version of himself who had heard the sounds but remained silent, allowing the men to be blown apart; and on another world it wasn’t a cannon at all, but a giant crossbow; and on another he’d worn a cape of silver and had called himself Magnifico; and on and on until dawn, his dreams intermingling with his waking visions. He woke with a bright beam of sunlight hitting his chest from a slit in the curtains and the chorus of the birds once more calling his mind to order. He woke and wandered about his apartment, lifting objects from the shelves and saying, ‘This is not my ornamental vase with bird motif. This is not
my beautiful lamp.’ But by the time the sun was high he had a theory, and his theory was grand, and his theory was mad, and his theory was this …

… That there are many universes, perhaps an infinite number; that each contains, and is contained within every other; and that all of them sing together like voices in a choir. It is a beautiful thing – a song of infinite harmony. It wasn’t yet a proper theory. It was hardly even an idea. But it was this idea that would shape the rest of his life and lead him to undertake a journey to the next universe, lead him to this very place, the airport of Carnassus, to a market where a tribe of bloodthirsty sailors were about to cut him open.

‘Gentlemen!’ said Fabrigas, to the massed assembly of grinning, murderous men. ‘Before our killing game begins, let us take a short moment to consider things from another perspective.’

‘Consider this po-spective, flesh-wizard,’ said a one-armed rogue as he raised his sword and cut a giant sea eel in two.

Flesh-wizard. That was one he hadn’t heard.

‘A cogent argument well made,’ said Fabrigas. ‘But really, there is no need for this day to end in death. Why would you strike us down? For are we not all travellers in this universe, and are we not brothers in the next? Are we not just like you? If you strike us, do we not weep? And if you stab us repeatedly with your swords, do we not bleed copiously from our abdomens?’ He held his hands, palms up, towards the sailors, his sleeves black holes before their faces. ‘I beseech you to look within your hearts. Think of those you once loved, and those you’ve lost, for as my great-uncle, the poet Treminos, once said: “
Vengeance, aghast, looks to the eyes of pain and sees / His brother, his sister, his self!
”
’

Then a change began. The sailors, by degrees, became sadder, their shoulders and their weapons slumped, they began weeping, right there in the market, huge blobs of briny water rolled fat down their cheeks and hit the filthy ground. They began to fall upon their knees, howling, sobbing, crying to the heavens. ‘Gaaaaaaaah-ha-ha-ha,’ they said. ‘My brother! My brother!’ they cried. ‘What have we done? What have we become?!’ ‘I never even learned to read!’ another cried. And still another cried: ‘I love you all so much!’ Fabrigas still had the twin black holes of his sleeves raised, and now at last he lowered them, and while the bandits bawled ferociously, while the vendors emerged, stunned, from their stalls, Fabrigas and his new friend, Carlos Lambestyo, slipped silently away.

NOOSE 145

In Carnassus, it is a fine evening. All is well. The hour of chaos has already subsided, though people will talk about it for weeks.

He came: the wizard! He made a hundred desperate sailors cry like babies with the sound of his voice!

There is a miasmic glow in the air tonight: a soothing haze which lags across this effluential paradise. What you thought to be all ugliness is beauty. Two lovers walk here, see? He a young naval officer, she a mistress of a dim profession. They have just met. Young love. It is like a royal procession: this king with his ceremonial sword of conquest; this queen with a sceptre of oily flowers in her hand; dogs and flying insects trailing behind in an adoring escort. The king and his queen step lightly past a ragged, lifeless dog, its belly taut with gas and maggots, its mangy coat peeled back, and its legs pointing lustily to the stars. The flies and insects dance merrily around it, the two lovers notice not. They stroll the catwalk above the great shipyard where hulks of unimaginable size are hammered out, oblivious to the chaos all around them, existing only for each other. Love can indeed exist in such a place as Carnassus, if only for a brief time, and if only after the exchange of an agreed sum.

And down below we find another budding relationship: two men have made it to the sanctuary of the carcass of a half-built warship, and the taller man – the one who looks like an angry warlock – has the smaller man – the one with the scars on his face – trussed up
from a spar by a noose around his ankle. Let’s listen.

‘So well done, you caught me. You really must be a wizard.’