The Choir Boats (38 page)

Nexius said, “The Verniculous Blast. So terrible that even we
in the Marines dare not use it. It can barely be controlled, often
destroying those who wield it as well as those it is aimed at.”

Dorentius added, “Do you remember the Supply Island, where
the air was weak and the buildings did not age? We have found
other places in the Interrugal Lands where the laws of nature are
not identical to those in our world and yours. On one of these we
found a material in an ore that, when altered and arrayed, causes
death. But not just death: a slow and horrible death, maiming and
mutilating slowly over months before killing.”

“A verniculous slow fire,” said Nexius.

“We in the Marines have long suspected the Doctors of keeping
the technology in violation of the law,” said Dorentius. “That they
would try to use it on you, whom we have called to help us, well, I
cannot fathom it, no matter how desirous we all are to open the door.
I am so sorry.”

Barnabas said, “We understand now that Yount is more complicated than perhaps we were led to believe, but I think we know
who our friends are in this place. I guess the Queen had little
choice — she seems to like us — but the Doctors did not get much of
a punishment.”

Nexius said, “Perhaps you should know that the Arch-Bishop is
also head of the House of Loositage.”

“The chief house in the Chamber of Optimates,” said Dorentius.

Sally made the connection. “The House Presumptive when the
Hullitate line ends,” she said.

“Unless the prophecy comes to pass,” said Nexius. “That the
eleventh dynasty in Yount shall be started by two from Karket-soom.”

“A prophecy the Arch-Bishop and all the Sacerdotes have declared
heretical,” said Dorentius.

“They say there was little salt in the Arch-Bishop’s tears when he
heard of Princess Zessifa’s disappearance,” noted Noreous.

“Oh,
Quatsch
,” said Barnabas. “We did not have to travel through
thick and thin for such bother. We have enough disagreement about
religion and politics back in England.”

Talk turned to the Cretched Man. Tom described again the
conversations he had with Jambres and the Minders. The Yountians
continued to be astonished: what Tom reported flew in the face of all
their experience and understanding.

“Sometimes the clay is better stuff than the glaze,” observed
Dorentius, sounding as if he needed to convince himself. “Perhaps the
Cretched Man truly is trying to help us.”

Nexius snorted.

Noreous said, “It has happened before that a seeming enemy
became an unexpected friend. Think about those Ornish who
refused to reject and came to our side in the War of Affirmation.”

Nexius said nothing but his doubt was plain to read.

Dorentius said, “Sometimes an osprey really can save a tern.”

Nexius waved his arm and said, “Still a gatekeeper. That’s what
the Wurm called him. Even if the Cretched Man wants to help us, he
cannot. He is under the power of Wurm.”

Tom objected, stressing Jambres’s desire to end Ornish slavery,
and thereby speed Yount’s release — and thus, presumably, his own.
He and Nexius debated some more until Sally interrupted.

“We cannot sit like the mule between the haystacks who dies
because he cannot decide which to eat first,” she said. “I am inclined
to think Tom is right about the Cretched Man’s intentions, but
likewise I believe Nexius is correct in saying the Cretched Man has
limited power to aid us.”

“So, what do we do now?” said Barnabas, ever more impressed
with his niece. (
To think that I raised her!
he thought.
Well, beans and
bacon, I must have had
something
to do with her upbringing, mustn’t I
have?
)

Sally said, “We make sure the fraulein recovers from . . . from her
action.” Fraulein Reimer had gone straight from the royal hearing
to her room.

Sanford said, “Hear, hear.” Everyone was silent for a few minutes.
Then Sanford spoke again: “You must speak with the Queen,
Barnabas, about your heart’s desire. You fulfilled your end of the
bargain.”

Everyone looked at Nexius, who nodded. “I will take you
tomorrow,” he said.

Barnabas went to the Queen with Nexius and, at Barnabas’s request,
Sanford.

“Sanford was there at this desire’s beginning,” said Barnabas.
“He needs to be here at its . . . ending, or whatever this will be.”

They met the Queen again in the small reception room. Only the
Lord-Chancellor was with her. There were few formalities, beyond
the Queen inquiring after Fraulein Reimer’s state.

“Let us start,” said the Lord-Chancellor. “Her Royal Majesty
honours her obligations. We can bring you to someone who is close
to your heart’s desire. More we cannot promise.”

“When?” breathed Barnabas, gripping his palempore vest so
hard it almost ripped.

“This very afternoon, if you wish.”

“I wish, oh how I wish.”

The Queen sat forward and took Barnabas’s hands in hers. She
said, “We ask pardon now if we have . . . meddled, is that your word?
Visit first this person and ask us questions after.”

Several hours later, on a Runnow-day in the early winter, late in
November by London standards, Barnabas stood before a door
in a wing of the Royal Palace in Yount. The Lord-Chancellor had
escorted him herself, with Nexius and Sanford. At the door, the
Lord-Chancellor paused before opening the lock.

“Pass through, and earn what we owe you for your services,” she
said, bowing. “But beware of unintended consequences. We have not
the foresight of Nessi in this matter, though all that we have done
has been done in good faith.”

Barnabas gripped Sanford’s shoulder for a moment, nodded to
Nexius, and walked alone through the door into a garden like none
he had ever seen. He was in a courtyard with arched walkways on all
four sides and a carved fountain in the middle. Paths ran from each
corner, to the fountain, with flowering bushes and beds of herbs in
between the paths. Banks of blood-red carnations filled each of the
four corners of the garden. Brightly coloured birds flew overhead,
alighting on perches under the arcades. Where the paths began
stood trees with rich silver-green leaves, some bearing fruit like
pomerances, some like shaddocks, yellow and orange-red. A late-afternoon winter sun slanted down over the top of the courtyard
but inside it was warm and scented and in bloom. Looking up in
wonder Barnabas saw that small flakes of snow fell onto a roof of
glass, stretched over a grid of thin iron beams.

He stood transfixed for many minutes in the marvellously large
conservatory, breathing in the colours of summer while it snowed
outside. An ornate thrush flew up from under a lilac bush, burst
into song. A jet-black squirrel with an impossibly long fluffy tail
stopped on a patch of lawn, ran up a fruit tree. A colibri, throat
iridescent scarlet, hovered at a mass of tubular yellow flowers that
ranged up a wall and wrapped themselves around a column of one
of the walkways — the hummingbird went from bloom to bloom and
then disappeared under the eaves. Everywhere he looked Barnabas
saw colours that flamed all the more for the pale oblique rays of the
November sun. Drawn by the sound of falling water, Barnabas looked
at the fountain to which all paths led. Its base was of white marble.
Lapis lazuli dolphins leaped in the branches of a spreading oak tree
carved of jade or malachite. The dolphins spouted water that ran
along the branches and dripped like gentle rain into the basin. The
colibri flew down, perched on the rim of the basin, dipped its sickle-beak. Two buntings with black heads and blue wings did the same.

White marble benches ringed the fountain, with more red
carnations planted beside them. Gradually Barnabas became
aware of a figure sitting on a bench on the far side of the fountain,
obscured by the falling water. No one else was in the garden. He
walked towards the fountain, his legs shaking. He ran his right
hand over his palempore vest, took off his hat (almost dropping it),
smoothed his thinning hair with the other hand, looked down to
be sure his stockings were not sagging. He rounded the fountain
and saw a woman sitting on the bench, looking away from him. He
cleared his throat, and felt as nervous as he had when he scaled the
wall to the garden in Bombay so many years ago. The woman on the
bench raised her head with a start and turned to look at Barnabas,
now fifteen feet away. They both gasped at the same time.

“Rehana!” whispered Barnabas, walking very slowly.

Under a blue silk headscarf showed glossy black hair in which silver
threads were woven. Her eyes were black, her skin the most beautiful
brown. From her ears hung silver half-moons, trembling. She clasped
her hands in front of her, unclasped them, re-clasped them, but she
returned his gaze. She said something in Yountish that Barnabas did
not understand but took to be a greeting. He moved closer, his mind
hurtling in doubt, hope, confusion. She held up her hand in a universal
sign of halting, so he stopped just in front of her.

She stood up and he heard tiny bells tinkle at her wrists, saw the
half-moons swing. Barnabas saw her lips tremble, her hands clasp
and unclasp but he was the one who could not meet her steady gaze.
Her dark eyes bore into his so that he almost quailed. He knew her but
he did not know her. Rehana but not Rehana. His mind continued its
frenzied racing, led by her eyes. Then she raised her right hand and
pointed at him, her finger resting lightly but firmly on his vest just
above his heart, and she said one word — as lightly but firmly as her
finger pinioned him, and Barnabas almost broke at the knees. He held
her gaze desperately as the one thing that could keep him standing.
She kept her finger on his vest and repeated the word. Barnabas
swayed backwards then, and sat down heavily on the bench next to
hers.

“Father,” she said, in English, for a third time, and then sat down
too.

Water fell from the dolphins. The hummingbird made its rounds
of the yellow flowers. The black squirrel dashed across the lawn.
For a long time, Barnabas and the woman on the bench beside his
said nothing. She held him in her gaze though, so forcefully that he
looked up and looked at her in earnest. He realized she could not be
Rehana — she was the same age as Rehana had been when Barnabas
had jumped over the wall in Bombay, twenty years earlier. She was
Sally’s age. Sally’s age, Barnabas thought, old enough to be my . . .

He shook his head. But he remembered. He remembered the
evening of the betrothal feast in the house of Adnan, the night
before he and Sanford were to sail back to London. He remembered
the magnificent food and the music and Adnan’s speech and his
in return and Adnan’s wife Yasmin steering everything from
behind the scenes. There was a young Sanford trying not to appear
gluttonous as he gorged on the goat’s meat masala, the last he would
get in its home country. There was Sitterjee, their Parsee friend, and
old Muir, the resident Scots merchant whose brogue was so thick
that few of the Indians understood him no matter how good their
English was. He saw Rehana’s uncle, Mohsin, and his wife, Bilkees,
smiling as they passed platters of food.
Yes
, he said to himself now
in the winter garden,
and after, what happened?
The grand feast had
ended, all the guests had gone, and he and Sanford had said a long
farewell to their hosts. How Rehana had wept, and her mother, and
Adnan (who would never have admitted it later).

Had it not been for Sanford, Barnabas would barely have made
it across the alley to their lodgings. But he slipped Sanford’s eye
later, and climbed back over the garden wall, where Rehana awaited
him one last time. That night, faced with the ache of separation
and emboldened by the promises made at the feast, they did what
they had never done before and what young lovers do in the fit of
passion in gardens under moonlight. Once only but it could have
been enough — was enough if the young woman on the bench beside
him spoke the truth.

The young woman picked up an object on the bench and handed
it to Barnabas. As she did so, she said in lilting English, “My mother
bid you take this and remember that you took her heart in a box just
like this one.”

Barnabas felt the world spin as she gave him a sandalwood box
that was the twin of the one in the partners’ office in Mincing
Lane. He no longer doubted in his mind what his heart had already
acknowledged. He had a daughter, whose mother was Rehana, and
that daughter was sitting beside him. The smell of sandalwood rose
up and he began to cry silently.

The young woman watched as Barnabas cried. Tears ran down
her face as well but she fought them, wanted to hold them back.
She clasped her hands hard together, sat up straighter than a spear,
pinned Barnabas with her eyes. Her voice shook only a little when
she said, “My mother said you would act this way if ever we met.”

Her tone cut through his tears. Barnabas set the box aside, feeling
a sudden chill. He pulled out a handkerchief, offered it to her. She
shook her head, so the half-moons flew. He used it on his own face.
His astonishment was giving way to a fear he could not name.

“Father,” she said in an accusatory tone. “You have not asked me
my name.”

Barnabas came back to his senses. “I am sorry,” he said. “It’s just
that you seem more prepared than I for our meeting.” He realized
how thin that sounded, and felt new shame added to his existing
accrual of debt in that emotion.

With a small twist of her beautiful head, she said, “I am called
Afsana.”

“Afsana,” murmured Barnabas. “Beautiful.”

“My mother hoped you would like it, having to choose it on her
own,” replied Afsana. “But she did not hope for you to first hear it
twenty years after my birth.”

Barnabas bowed his head. To this, he had no answer. Ten
thousand questions flooded his mind, and as many answers for
questions he assumed she would have of him, but he dared not ask
his questions under the fierceness of her gaze, and she asked him
nothing. They sat in silence for some time, with the sandalwood
box between them like a challenge or admonition. Finally he said,
“Where is your mother?”