The Revolutions (39 page)

Clotho rose to her feet. With a thought, she indicated that Josephine should follow her. Then she went out into the street. Piccadilly, trembling, stood and went with her. The rest of the Fates turned their attention back to bead-making.

*   *   *

Josephine followed Clotho and Piccadilly alongside the rose-red river, through streets of white stone shadowed by towers. She was at first surprised that Clotho would venture out into the city alone, without a bodyguard or retinue, without secretaries or footmen or maids-in-waiting. Then she saw how passers-by looked at her, and understood that the whole city was Clotho’s bodyguard, and retinue, and everything else she could need.

Their route took them away from the river, and towards a part of the city where the buildings were for the most part uninhabited. Great white dusty mausoleums, in the shadow of the wall of the crater; cold, gloomy, and remote. In the sky, the face of Mars was deep indigo, almost invisible against the blackness, and the red moon was a tiny splash of blood.

Clotho gave no explanation. Piccadilly appeared lost in his own thoughts, sad and hopeful at once. Was it possible that they had some way for her to go home—that they were taking her to some sort of port or gateway? They’d fled the face of Mars for the white moon; they must have some way of travelling between the worlds. Piccadilly’s mood was odd—was he sorry to see her leave for her own world? Perhaps. On the other hand, it occurred to her that she might be bound for imprisonment, or execution. Her audience with the Fates had had something of the quality of a trial, and it was not at all clear to her that the verdict had been favourable.

She supposed she had no choice but to trust them. It was that or go back to haunting the cracks and corners of the city, perhaps for ever.

Clotho led them along a wide road—it had the air of a triumphal avenue, but it was silent and empty—and deeper into the gloomy districts at the city’s edge, until finally their road came to an end, dissolving into a wide expanse of rocks and rubble at the base of the crater’s wall. By now, they were entirely in shadow. The wall occluded Mars-light; at its foot there was near-total darkness. The rocks there were bare and lifeless, free of the red moss that throve everywhere else in the city. Only a faint light from the towers behind them lit their way as Piccadilly helped the ancient matron over the rough ground.

There was a cave—a deep crack, thin but tall, in the rough white rock of the crater’s edge. It was utterly dark inside. With a wave of her fingers, Clotho made a small flame in the palm of her hand, revealing a plain tunnel of stone, rough-hewn, low-ceilinged, leading down.

Josephine was far beyond being surprised by mere fire-starting; it seemed no odder than striking a match. The tunnel was nondescript; but Piccadilly was trembling, and even Clotho had an attitude of quiet reverence.

The tunnel led only a little way into the underground before opening out into a great hall. Rough rock underfoot gave way to smooth and glistening paving stones. Nine-pointed pillars rose up into the darkness. The ceiling and the far walls were too distant to make out without abandoning Clotho’s little circle of firelight, which Josephine had no intention of doing. She was suddenly conscious, as with a persistent itch that she’d been reminded of, that it was utterly freezing down in that subterranean darkness. No wonder Piccadilly was trembling.

For as far as she could see, the hall was full of the dead.

Piccadilly appeared frozen. Terror and uncertainty and sorrow radiated from him. Clotho stared fixedly forward, as if waiting for Josephine to do something.

With a jerk, Piccadilly started moving again, rushing forward, moving amongst the dead almost frantically. Clotho’s light followed him.

Row upon row of Martians lay on the floor of the vault; row upon row in neat parallel lines converging in the darkness. Firelight glinted off folded wings. Curled up like sleeping children, knee-to-chin, they were surprisingly small, surprisingly vulnerable. As Piccadilly led them farther and deeper into the vault—hunting left and right, tracing his steps from memory—there was more and more dust gathered on the bodies. Some of them had been there for a very long time. Like Arthur and his knights, waiting to be woken; or like butterflies in a case, row upon row upon row, pinned and dried and dead …

But not quite dead; or at least, not all of them. Sometimes, as they passed, a pair of folded wings would shift slightly, the frilled edges rippling, as if glad of the touch of firelight. Fingers twitched. Chests rose and fell, almost but not quite imperceptibly. Not dead; sleeping. Hibernating, perhaps. Dozens and dozens of them. Young and old, male and female. Some terribly scarred, some not.

Piccadilly stopped. He crouched beside the sleeping body of a young female, and gently touched her wings.

Then he and Clotho waited, as if they expected the body to wake, or Josephine to wake her. To breathe life into her.

For a moment Josephine despaired, thinking it was just more confusion, another misunderstanding; they’d taken her for a real angel, and imagined she could heal the sick, wake the dead …

Then, all at once, she understood what they were telling her.

This was Piccadilly’s—what? Child? Wife? Friend? Child, she thought. Her mind and her spirit were gone. All of the dozens or hundreds of sleepers in the great hall were the same. They were empty; their souls and their minds were gone. Casualties of war. What war? That hardly mattered now. She could make no sense of the visions Clotho and Piccadilly were sending her. The red moon, whirling around and around; the clash of armies in the sky over the white city. She didn’t understand. What mattered was that they were offering her a body to replace the one she’d left behind in London.

Piccadilly trembled.

What sort of sacrifice was this? Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter for a fair wind, didn’t he? What had Clotho promised poor Piccadilly? Or, more important, what was Piccadilly asking of her? For her to be one of them? For her to be
what
to him? To fill this empty vessel with her spirit. A manifestation; a materialization; a conjuration, stranger than anything Mrs Esther Sedgley had ever imagined. A metamorphosis. Waking on another world like a Princess in a fairy tale, among elves and fairy folk, in the magic places under the hill, on the far side of the moon!

The body in question was short for a Martian, but with long and bright and very finely edged wings. It was mostly indigo, dark for a Martian—the same sort of shade as Piccadilly, in fact. It was pretty. It was monstrous. It was fascinating and revolting.

Could she enter this body? Was it possible, this unprecedented metamorphosis or resurrection or reincarnation? Did Clotho know, or was she guessing? Was this a matter of ordinary medicine on the moons of Mars, or was it a wild experiment? She’d had enough of wild experiments. Should she do it? Would she be able to leave again?

If she refused, what would become of her? Alone for ever, ghostly, drifting, dissolving into nothingness …

With a sensation of giving herself up to a dream, Josephine moved towards the body and studied the blank silver eyes. For an instant they were like a mirror, in which she saw herself seeing herself. Then the next thing she knew there was a cacophony of sounds and sensations, an incomprehensible torrent of pain and joy and terror and feelings she couldn’t name. The sensation of her wings opening! The world seen through wide silvery eyes. Colours were a hundred times brighter, as if she’d been seeing through a fog all this time. Piccadilly was bright as a parrot. The transformation of her perceptions that had been taking place slowly during her time on the moon finally rushed to completion. She saw Piccadilly for the first time without any suggestion of the
creature
about him, but simply as a rather dignified old man—an old soldier, something rather like a retired Major. Clotho had the plain grandeur of an abbess.

Josephine stood. It seemed to her that she was making some sort of noise. She fell over immediately, in a tangle of unfamiliar limbs, knees and elbows striking stone. Pain was a joy.

Chapter Twenty-eight

Mr Vaz, his head and shoulders already thickly layered with dust, sat on a rock and muttered about Hell and damnation. Sometimes he lowered his head until it was almost on his knees, so that he appeared to be praying; he was in fact struggling for breath.

“Lord Atwood has brought us to Hell,” he said. “What else would you call this? He has damned us.”

Atwood wasn’t there to hear this indictment of his character. He’d gone off to the edge of their camp some hours ago, to confer with Sun on their predicament.

Dimmick squatted on his haunches, idly scratching with his knife in the dirt, staring into the distance. There was a haze in the air—dust, and something oddly twinkling that was not dust. It appeared to be twilight; at least, one would hope it wasn’t what passed for daylight on Mars. At the far horizon a row of tremendous mountains met a sky of black clouds, streaked with nightshade and lurid foxglove—a venomous sky. Clouds had covered both moons, the rose and the red. Thank God—it had induced a certain odd vertigo, to see those two moons chasing each other across the heavens.

Between the expedition’s hasty and makeshift camp and the far horizon there were no signs of civilization, or greenery, or life. Green was an unknown colour here.

“Hell,” said Mr Vaz.

“Shut up,” Payne said.

Dimmick stood, and sheathed his knife. “Let him talk. He’s right, ain’t he? Call it what you like—this is Hell.”

Vaz laughed, then started to cough.

Dimmick paced the boundaries of the camp. He was soon no more than a lumbering shadow in the haze. Among the many odd properties of the haze was that it distorted vision, unpredictably, like sea-water. He had no destination. He was keeping busy. Something in the atmosphere made joints stiffen quickly.

They’d been on Mars for perhaps half a day—it was hard to be sure. Nobody’s watch had survived translation. They had not yet glimpsed the sun. They’d moved no more than a half-mile from the place they’d arrived, and set down what Atwood called a camp in a circle of rocks in the lee of a tall sweep of rock that gave no shelter from the cold. They grumbled, paced, quarrelled, prayed. Moods of religious horror passed over each of them from time to time, then moved on, like the shadow of a cloud, leaving them cold and drained. There was something unnerving in the air, something a little like the stillness and pressure that on Earth would precede a storm, but here seemed to precede nothing at all. This was a dead world.

They’d arrived—
manifested
—in various states of weakness, disorientation, and dismay. Atwood and Sun had been up on their feet limping around within half an hour or so, but Arthur had been unable to stand for at least an hour, and one or two of the men had taken it worse. Like drowning, Vaz said, seeming to speak from experience—or like the sensations produced by the Work of Gracewell’s Engine. Just the thought of it—
I am on Mars
—was so strange that it made one’s legs go weak.

There were eight of them. Archer’s son had not appeared, and it seemed likely that he would not. It was better not to think about what had happened to him—what might still happen to the rest of them, for all anyone knew. Martin Atwood and Sun were off by the edge of the camp, pacing, deep in conversation—there was an occasional violet flash as Atwood lit a cigarette. Dimmick was now kicking desultorily at rocks. Vaz was doubled over coughing. Then there was the military contingent—Messrs. Payne, Frank, and Ashton.

Ashton was unwell. According to Payne, Ashton claimed to have learned magic from the feet of the Secret Mahatmas in Tibet, after deserting from the Army in India. Whatever secret learning he might or might not have acquired, it didn’t seem to have done him much good. He’d survived the transit, but only by the skin of his teeth. He lay on the ground, green at the gills and moaning softly, with his jacket wadded up as a pillow under his head. No one knew what else to do for him.

Frank and Payne and Arthur investigated the supplies.

The supplies had caught fire back in London, when Archer dropped her paraffin lamp; but now they were here. That was another thing that was best not thought about too closely. Otherwise one might begin to wonder if this really
was
Hell—if they weren’t, in fact, dead, and surrounded by the ghostly shadows of their former lives. But no good came of thinking that way. One could glimpse horror in a can of soup. The important thing was to keep busy. Arthur and Payne and Frank were conducting an inventory. “Keep warm, chaps,” Arthur said. “Keep moving, that’s the thing. Spirits up.” Frank and Payne, never a talkative pair, worked in grim silence. Wise of them, Arthur supposed. The thin air made talking hard work. Of course they were used to mountainous territory.

After a while, Vaz came and joined them.

“Are you well enough, Mr Vaz?”

“Better to work than to think, don’t you think, Mr Shaw? Wasn’t that always our method back in Deptford?”

Not all of the articles the Company had gathered had survived the transit; and some that had survived the transit had been lost, scattered all over the dunes as they moved to their current camp, through the dark and the wind, in a state of fumbling panic.

There were three small folded tents, but one was torn beyond hope of repair. There was needle and thread. Three spare pairs of boots and a dozen pairs of socks. Three loaded Martini-Henry rifles. Six knives of varying sizes. Four walking-sticks. Four camp-stools, of which three were broken. A superfluity of spoons. Nine compasses, all of which spun uselessly, apparently unable to find north. Perhaps Mars didn’t have a north. Payne lost his temper and stamped on one. Tobacco. Three belts, two coats. Not nearly the right sort of clothing for the cold; they should be wrapped up like polar explorers. Two pairs of binocular field-glasses. A canister of paraffin, for the hurricane lamps, and a tin of creosote, for use as an antiseptic. Tonic of iron and strychnine (one bottle). Isinglass plaster, for open wounds. Opium, for diarrhoea. Opium for nerves. Cocaine, to maintain energy. Mescaline, and a small quantity of hashish, and God only knew what else; Atwood had packed such a quantity of drugs that it seemed to Arthur he might just as well have stayed home and taken his drugs and dreamed of whatever he wanted to dream.