Empire Dreams (9 page)

A great black kite as wide as the sky is flying outside your window and tapping gently on the glass as it dances on the edge of the storm. The stormkite.

At that same instant of horrified recognition there is a hammering on the door downstairs. That door is six-inch shiptimber, but under those blows it sounds as fragile as dried drift.

“Open up, Mr. MacHenry, open up, I say!” That bellowing voice drains all motion from you.

Christian.

Locks are being drawn back, latches lifted. The door scrapes open.

No, Da, don’t let him in, don’t let him near me! you want to shout but the words have died in your throat. The stormkite scratches malevolently at the glass. It is almost as if it has
summoned
this evil wind to come hunting you.

“Where is he, where is the boy, the thief, the little thief who stole my Black Kite?” Christian’s voice sweeps Ma and Da away like leaves in a tempest.

“No, Christian, I didn’t steal, I didn’t,” you whimper and dive to lock the door. Da is shouting loudly now, demanding names and reasons, ordering your brother to run up to the Coast Guard Station for help, but Christian roars “Silence!” and even the storm falls quiet for an instant.

In that instant you know he has fourseen and found you.

Now he is coming up the stairs, one step, two step, three step, four, now he is on the landing, now he is at the door.

The door handle rattles, the door jars against the lock. There is a pause for a second, then an ugly shout with nothing of the pebble-worn old voice of the kiteman left in it:

“Boy, open the door! Open this door; give me back my kite and I will go in peace, just return my property to me, I have dire need of it.”

There is no way you will ever open that door.

Then the blows come, each one twice as heavy as the one before. The doorframe shudders under the impacts. Surely no human fist could strike that hard, and every second the blows double in strength.

There is an explosion and the door blows into splinters. Christian stands there like a tree riven by lightning, holding his staff in both hands. Blue fire shimmers around its silver heels.

“Fraser, where is my kite?” There is a grief too heavy for whole worlds to bear in those words.

Time freezes over like a winter estuary; Christian, your Ma, your Da, your sister trembling by the bannister, all stand frozen like bulrushes in January as you present the dead, ruined thing to Christian.

“It was a mistake,” you plead, holding it up before him. “I touched it.”

Christian looks down at you from light-year’s distance.

“Oh, Fraser,” he says, with aching gentleness, “Fraser!” and that final syllable howls out in a roar that goes on and on and on and on and you tear at your ears and squeal, “Stop it, Christian, stop it, stop it, stop it!” And at last it does stop and the room is empty.

Christian and his kites are gone.

Replaced by—a hall full of grim people with lanterns and weapons—someone asking, “Where, Fraser, where where?”—light catching on shotguns and polished Coast Guard cap-badges—all these come to you like an album of summer snapshots. What is real is that dreadful, dreadful scream ringing round and round in your head. You know it will echo there for always.

“Where, Fraser, tell us where!” the voice insists.

“Caravan by the Cannery, in the dunes,” you sob and in seven words betray him.

“Right!” Heavy men in heavy boots stamp in the hall. Hastily wrapped in a heavy sea-coat, your own brother carries a ponderous whaling lance and a look on his face that he will not have to use it. The men crunch off down the path in puddles of lantern-light. Ma takes you upstairs, but you struggle free and skip away from the snatching hand. Then you are after them into the twilight.

How fast they are! You had hoped to dash ahead of them and warn Christian, but the heat in their blood must drive them on like ship’s boilers. They are easy to follow: the sway of their lanterns and the mumble-grumble of their angry voices carry over the windswept dunes and when those are lost there are their heavy, nailed bootprints pressed hard into the sand. Boots are good in the sand, that is why they are so far ahead of you, slithering and sliding in your slippers. The sky hangs huge above yet the stars feel as close and familiar as thistledown. Meteors kindle away to nothing on the edge of the horizon.

There are no kites flying in the gloaming above Cannery Pier.

In the hollow in the dunes is a yellow knot of lantern-light. Men’s voices are raised, ugly and angry, and Da’s ugliest and angriest of all. You scrabble up the dune face and part the grass to peer down unnoticed into the valley.

In a circle of yellow light, Christian sits on the steps of the caravan turning the smashed frame of the Black Kite over and over in his hands. The stormkite sits propped against the rear of the caravan by his side. Da is shouting questions and the faces of the men come to arrest him are grim, but Christian does not look up. They might as well not be there.

Tiring of Christian’s obstinacy, Da gives an order. The men close in. Two of them grasp Christian and drag him to his feet. He does not resist. The kite falls from his hands and is unheedingly trampled under the heavy boots.

You cannot bear to see this. You cannot let them take him without a word. You climb to the crest of the dune and shout, “Christian!” You wave to him, he must see you. “Christian!”

Heads turn. Every eye fixes on you standing there in your dressing gown and slippers.

“Fraser,” your Da cries, “Fraser, you shouldn’t be here. Away home with you; Dougal, take him home.” Obediently, your brother drops his whaling lance and comes for you, feet sinking deep in the sand. Christian stirs, sees you.

“Ah, Fraser,” he rumbles like sad stones rolling on a beach. With a slow flex of his muscles he throws his captors away from him and comes to you. There are shouts. Men surge around Christian. There is scuffling. Christian is incredibly strong, strong as iron. Men tumble and wrestle in the sand. There are oaths and cries. The sudden crack of a shotgun splits the night in two.

The old skewbald pony goes mad with fright, plunging and kicking. The hollow is full of frantic motion.

“Hold the horse, the damn horse, somebody hold him,” a man shouts. One man dives for the frenzied pony’s halter, the others try to hold Christian down. The pony shies away from the looming man and kicks out.

From your forgotten vantage point you are perfectly placed to see the awful thing that happens next.

In its skittering dance the pony kicks a lantern against the caravan wheel. Glass shatters and burning oil splashes all over the woodwork. Paint blisters, blackens, bums. Within seconds the caravan is a bonfire.

The wind fans the greedy flames; with an ugly, gleeful roaring and sucking they snap and shrivel the lovely thing. The beautiful kites are seared away like so much scrap paper: the sunkite and the moonkite, the dragon and the butterfly and the hawk, the windkite and the kite with clouds on it, all turned to ash in a second. Even the stormkite by the door shrivels and bursts into flame. The blazing timbers crumble and the burning caravan folds up and collapses inwards in a gout of fire.

There is nothing left of the stormkite but a white metal skeleton. With its death the wind dies down.

The fire knocks the fight out of everyone. The men watch with horror. This was not their intent, to burn the beautiful caravan, they only came to bring justice to this man who stands looking with eyes nailed open by the flames. The blaze settles lower. Soon it will be out.

Christian turns away. His eyes search for you, but you know that it is his foursight, though so blinded by the actions of other people that he was unable to avert any of this night’s tragedy, which finds and fixes you. He holds you with his gaze and you cannot look away. He raises his hands to his face. The men close in, hasty to act. He holds them back with a gesture. This is for you only. Then he will go.

“Fraser, I can’t blame you though heaven knows I ought to. But does any snowflake in an avalanche feel responsible? No less you for your simple, good-hearted ignorance. Perhaps I’m still paying the price of the Pilot’s pride; if so, it was bought dearly.”

He touches his hands to his cheeks in a curious motion. And his face falls into his hands.

The men gasp and step back, reaching for weapons.

Up on the dune you feel like your soul is being torn out by its roots.

Delicate mechanisms ooze and pulse where Christian’s face once was. The gray eyes sunk in gray metal look into you.

“You had to rush ahead and find the end of the story before I led you to it, didn’t you, Fraser? So now you know, and I hope you’re the wiser for it.

“You see, if you’d listened I’d have told you how I had the surgeon on the transport make me into this unchanging thing, for otherwise how could I have borne all those years of waiting past and those yet to come? Mere flesh will be dust when she returns across the sky, so I must clothe the perishable in imperishability to be there for her. And, how else could I truly love a machine, unless I became one too?

“But look at this face, Fraser, look at it and know that it is agony to be a machine, to be only the memory of flesh. Ask yourself, what could ever be worth that price? Only the certainty of her love. I have her promise that she will return, and unlike men, machines are bound by their word. I had that certainty, the only valid coin I possessed, and you took it from me, Fraser. Oh, the kite was pain enough, but even then I could still have hoped, but what if they now take me and try me and put me in a cell? I cannot fool myself. For that shadow across the face of the moon could be hers, or those footsteps passing beneath the bailey wall. And then my mortal soul in this immortal frame will die a little. You see, I’ll never be certain, and only the certainty made life bearable. Now I will never know. But you know, Fraser.”

And he nods to the men with his machine head, and they reluctantly come and take him away.

And that is the last part of Christian’s story.

But his face still looks up from the sand into the dawning sky and you know you will never be able to meet the gaze of those empty eyes.

* * * *

Though the days no longer hold the frenzied heat of summer, there is still a lingering warmth as they dwindle towards the perpetual midnight of Darkwinter.

The beach is still a good place for a boy to play on the short afternoons, when school is done and friends gone home, when Da is serving and Ma busy with mussel soup and soused gurnards, when Sister is reading in the weather room and Brother in town for a new set of strings and even Mr. Cat prefers the company of the bugs under the veranda. The Cannery is still there, though folk don’t go there so often now that they’ve chained it off and hung warning signs giving notice of its demolition, and the hulks remind you rather too much of things you would sooner forget. But there are always the games a boy can play with the sea.

Thousands of games, some as old as the sea itself, others that swim up like new-hatched elvers out of your imagination. There are imaginary countries to be mapped, peopled, and invaded on the uncharted wastes of the shore. There are springs to be forded, bridged, dammed, and then blasted back into their original state. There are messages, some cryptic and coded, some just a hopeful call for a reply, to be sealed into bottles and re-addressed to the waves. There is never any want of things to do on the beach.

And when he tires of games, a boy can always beachcomb along the tideline for whatever treasures the ocean chooses to release. Glass fishing floats, rusty chunks of metal that might once have been ship’s fittings, bottles (always empty) worn opaque by tumbling sand, lengths of rope, oddly shaped pieces of driftwood, sea-purses holding a fortune in grit, pieces of crumbled cork, feathers and bones …

The sea casts up some funny things: you never know what a boy might find if he searches long enough.

DR. EDWARD GARRET DESMOND’S PERSONAL DIARY: APRIL 12, 1909.

LAST NIGHT, UPON
the occasion of my daughter Emily’s sixteenth birthday, I took the liberty of drawing Lord Fitzgerald, a keen amateur astronomer and fellow of the Society, aside from the celebrations (such girlish things doubtless holding little appeal for the Marquis of Claremorris) and showed him through my telescope the object referred to by my philistine colleagues in the Royal Irish Astronomical Society as “Bell’s Comet.” Lord Fitzgerald I know to be a highly educated and intelligent man (a rare commodity in these days of inbred gentry and fossilised aristocracy) and a close friend who would receive openly and without prejudice my speculations upon the nature of “Bell’s Comet.”

Whilst at the telescope the Marquis observed one of the object’s periodic flarings (which I have calculated to occur once every twenty-eight minutes) when, for a second or so, “Bell’s Comet” becomes as bright as a major planet. Lord Fitzgerald expressed a great and open curiosity in the phenomenon, and as he had previously intimated to me that he would be unable to attend the meeting of the Society which I am to address four days hence (due to a commitment in that great cauldron of muddy thought and confusion, the House of Lords in London), I explained my hypothesis briefly to Lord Fitzgerald, partly as a preparation for my lecture to my peers, partly, I must confess, to win a favorable ear. Here I must add that it is more than the Marquis of Claremorris’s ear I mean to win; I have need of his considerable fortune if “Project Pharos” is to be brought to fruition.

On a personal note, how good it was to have Emily about the house again! She is like a beam of spring sunshine, flitting through the house like a faery brightening whatever she touches. Why, I had not realised what a dark and gloomy place Craigdarragh is without her until she arrived from Dublin and the Cross and Passion School this morning. I rather fear that I have grown engrossed in my work to the exclusion of all else, even my dearest daughter!

Domestic memo: I must remind Mrs. O’Carolan to have a man up from the town to look at the electricals: last night’s current failure caused great distress to the young ladies at the party. Voltage fluctuations apart, the birthday tea was most successful; Emily was clearly delighted. Young girls are so easily pleased!