The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers (13 page)

He took a deep, slow breath. Then another. Calming himself. Steadying himself. How did he feel? Well actually, not too bad. In fact, he felt fine. He felt good. He realised the initial shock had been due more to his own fear than the liquor’s chemistry. He reminded himself that he was, after all, an Ebrell Islander. For generations, anyone born on the Ebrells had perished in youth if they lacked the capability to handle hard liquor. Centuries of selective breeding had given Chegory a distinct genetic advantage when it came to handling strong drink.

I won’t die tonight. Not if I’m careful.

Thus thought Chegory Guy.

But, nevertheless, he warned himself to be very, very careful. He nursed his drink, and was nursing it still when a trio of soldiers entered the saloon.

‘Peace,’ said Hooch Neesberry, seeing Chegory’s alarm. ‘These are regular customers of ours.’

Then - doubtless out of devilment - he introduced Chegory to the newcomers.

‘So!’ said one, ‘so you’re the infamous Chegory Guy! Shabble’s companion in crime, are you? Oho, are you in trouble! There’s men burnt bad who’ve sworn to bum you alive.’

‘I’m innocent!’ protested Chegory.

‘You’re an Ebby, aren’t you?’ said the other soldier. ‘So how can you be innocent?’

This witticism set both soldiers to laughing.

Chegory’s fingers were already fists. A sullen anger hardened his face. He was but a joke away from brawling.

‘Come, friends,’ said Neesberry, seeing that brawling was imminent. ‘Finish your drinks and come with me. I’ve something to show you.’

Then he led Chegory and his two Ashdan companions from the saloon and into some quiet back rooms where there were a few pallets on the floor.

‘Here we sleep at times like this when it’s best to lie low,’ said Neesberry. ‘Likely you’re tired. Feel free to get your heads down and get some rest.’

Chegory said he would be more than happy to do so. Indeed, he was tired. It had been a long, long day. His sleep the night before had been disrupted by disturbances at the Dromdanjerie; he had worked hard physically all morning and mentally all afternoon; he had been shaken up by an encounter with a kraken then further traumatised by his sudden arrest and Shabble’s foolhardy assault on the arresting soldiers.

He was exhausted.

‘You sleep, then,’ said Ingalawa. ‘I’m going to have a word with Ivan and friend Firfat.’

Go she did, with Neesberry departing with her. But Olivia elected to stay. Strangely, Chegory found fatigue miraculously dispelled once he found himself thus alone with the young Ashdan lass in a room well-equipped with shadows, beds and privacy.

How long must we speculate before we divine the thoughts which must necessarily have presented themselves to his mind?

‘Precious is the day and precious is the flesh which enables the day.’ So says the Creed, which also tells us that ‘Great is the Gift of Life and sacred is the preservation of the same.’ Yet in our day-to-day life habit dulls our appreciation of existence, our awareness of what life has to offer and our knowledge of our own mortality.

Since Chegory Guy had long sought safety in habit, routine and the renunciation of ambition, he had long been more dull than most. In childhood he had endured the terrors of the pogrom which had claimed the lives of his mother, brother and sister. Thereafter, his greatest ambition had been to be a rock, something utterly insignificant and inoffensive, something the world would never think worth the effort of destruction. Chegory had lived by rote for a long, long time. (Here we are of course dealing with time as youth measures that mystery, for old age would think young Chegory had scarcely been born.)

By rote he had lived till this day, when events both major and minor had disrupted the even tenor of his cherished routines. His brush with death and with the law had awakened him to a terrifying appreciation of his own mortality. He also found himself alive to the world of the flesh.

To the world of beauty.

Olivia Qasaba!

Long had he denied the lust which urged him to possess her. Yet in the here and now it was hard to deny his desire. Soft were her curves and bright was the sheen of her skin. A light was alive in her eyes, and he allowed himself to imagine that she was remembering the valour with which he had contended against the kraken on the harbour bridge.

The caution which had governed his relations with Olivia in the Dromdanjerie was at low ebb. He was possessed by something akin to the recklessness which stirs the blood in time of war and sets the appetites seething. He imagined Olivia indulging him with a kiss. He was conscious of the gloss of her hair and of a certain fragrance which hung about her. He imagined—

But we all know exactly what he imagined. There is no need to elaborate further. Suffice to say that he studied the young woman intently while pretending to scrutinise his fingertips.

Olivia of the moods uncertain! What was she thinking of? What thinking? What? Only one way to find out. Ask!

‘Olivia,’ said Chegory.

He meant to make her name itself a poem. But he was truly tired despite his enthusiasm for the life of the moment. His tongue slurred her name, thickened it, made her middle-aged and dowdy, insulted her beyond redemption. Or so thought Chegory. Yet Olivia answered him:

‘Yes?’

Yes. She said yes. But to what? To nothing, for the moment. But one day, surely, she would say yes to all. To him, to his strength, to his need, to his urgency.

Chegory found himself trembling.

Then an outbreak of uproar abruptly ended this delightful dalliance. The two young people got to their feet in alarm as the building echoed with shouts, screams, the thumping of trampling boots and the resounding crash of sledgehammers smashing down doors.

‘Gods!’ said Olivia. ‘What is it?’

‘We’re being raided,’ said Chegory. ‘Come on! Let’s get out of here!’

But attempts to escape were futile. Chegory and Olivia had scarcely got out of the bedroom when shadows jumped them. Chegory was seized. Slammed up against a wall. Mobbed by a good half dozen soldiers.

‘Help!’ screamed a nearby panic.

His own throat shouted:

‘Olivia!’

Then he was slammed again, hit, struck, pounded. All voice knocked out of him by twenty knuckles, thirty. An elbow hard against his face then sharp, sharp, a swordpoint sharp-needling into his throat.

‘Don’t move, Ebby!’ said a snarl. ‘Or you’re dead!’

‘You’re under arrest,’ said an authority. '

Chegory felt his legs buckling.

‘Don’t move, I said!’

But down he went regardless, helpless to save himself, the world crashing around him as he fell.

He was kicked to his feet.

‘You’re under arrest,’ said a triumph.

‘I told him that already,’ said an authority first heard but moments before.

Then another voice:

‘The charge is drug pushing.’

‘Wha—’

Thus his throat, mouthing a single syllable void of meaning. His legs void of strength. Curt efficiency dragging him away already. His feet kicking behind him. Screaming. Someone screaming. Olivia, Olivia!

But Chegory was helpless to save her. All fight, all sense, all thought had been knocked out of him. Like a carcase he was carried, dragged, handled, thrust. He had lost track of where he was, where they were taking him, how far they had come.

Then a bright and blinding light lit his surroundings. He was in the main hall of the warehouse. Artemis Ingalawa was struggling, fighting four soldiers who had hold of a limb apiece. Firfat Labrat and Ivan Pokrov were being hustled out of an office at swordpoint, protesting loudly. Above—

Light light light!

Shabble, surely.

‘Chegory!’ cried Shabble. ‘Chegory, dearest!’

Then, in extremis, Chegory Guy found his voice.

‘Don’t do anything!’ yelled Chegory.

If Shabble let rip and fried a few soldiers, then Chegory Guy would most certainly get the blame. Then the army might of its own initiative launch a pogrom against all Injiltaprajura’s surviving Ebrell Islanders, no matter what the Empress said.

‘Burning,’ chanted Shabble. ‘Burning burning burning.’ Then Pokrov’s voice rose above the uproar in a shout large-volumed by his desperation.

‘Shabble! Come here! Right now! Or I will send you to a therapist immediately!’

To Chegory’s great relief, the lord of misrule obeyed, and no further threats of incineration were issued from that source as Chegory and his fellow captives were hustled outside into the night.

CHAPTER TEN

Shortly after the raid on Firfat Labrat’s premises in the dockside quarter of Marthandorthan, some prisoners were brought to the gates of the Temple of Torture in Goldhammer Rise. Firfat himself was not one of those prisoners. At that very moment he was back at his warehouse remunerating the soldiers who had just done him a favour by demonstrating to him the manifest inadequacy of his security arrangements.

Chegory, however, was in no position to buy himself out of trouble. For a start, he had no money. Also, unlike Firfat he did not have friends prepared to help him with negotiations. Firfat, on the other hand, had a judge, three priests, a couple of bankers and Injiltaprajura’s harbourmaster all on his side.

Could Firfat have saved young Chegory Guy? Perhaps. If he had really exerted himself. But then again, perhaps not. After all, the soldiers did have a quota to fill, and thus were glad to be able to deliver Chegory Guy, Olivia Qasaba, Artemis Ingalawa and Ivan Pokrov to the detention centre.

Shabble was not technically under arrest but bobbed along with them anyway, soaring out of the way whenever an irritated soldier tried to swat the beacon-bright summoner of all night-flying insects.

At the temple gates the prisoners were signed for, as if they were a consignment of cassava or so many sacks of coconuts. Then they were taken into the temple precincts, which were crowded with detainees of all ages, races and sexes, many slumped in sleep already despite certain obstacles to peaceful repose in the form of squalling babies and squabbling in-laws.

‘Oh well,’ said Chegory, ‘it doesn’t look too bad. Let’s find a quiet corner and get settled.’

To Chegory’s horror, Ingalawa and Pokrov had no intention at all of quietly settling down. Instead, they began to protest long and loud, demanding lawyers, bail, release, apologies. Chegory feared they would all get beaten up. He was already stiff and sore from the thumping he had taken in Firfat’s warehouse, and had no wish whatsoever to add to his injuries. To his relief, Ingalawa’s protests diminished after a fellow captive explained that they could not get access to lawyers because a State of Emergency had been declared.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That explains it. Okay then, we’ll make the best cf it. But I do wish we had mosquito nets.’

These Ashdan liberals! Weird is too weak a word for it! Ingalawa typifies some of the attitudes of the breed. She had protested vehemently solely on the grounds that she was being deprived of her legal rights. On a point of principle, in other words. For that she had risked a beating. Then, once she knew their detention was lawful, all her objections had ceased. It was not being locked up that worried her - no, for she was tough, she was with freinds, she could hack it. No trouble!

Chegory, far more concerned with mere survival than with his rights, found Ingalawa’s attitudes alien, to say the least. He was not nearly so sanguine. If truth be told, he was near frantic with worry. He was under arrest on a drugs charge. What worse could happen?

‘Shabble!’ said Pokrov. ‘Turn down your light! You’re pulling in every bug in creation!’

But Shabble made no reply. Instead, the imitator of suns sang sweet madrigals, quite lost in a musical fugue. So the humans ignored the lord of chaos, tried (less successfully) to ignore the swarms of insects lured by the light of the singing one, and endeavoured to compose themselves for sleep.

Olivia produced an ivory comb and began to stroke it through her long, silky black hair. Chegory watched her out of the corner of his eye. Shortly he had to carefully compose his limbs so no evidence of his uprising passion would be visible. He was not at all embarrassed at this; it was such a common occurrence that he indulged in the necessary manoeuvres without thinking.

‘Shall we tell our dreams?’ said Ingalawa.

The telling of dreams is an Ashdan custom followed in Ashmolea South and Ashmolea North alike. One does not tell the dreams one has endured already; instead, one tells the dreams one wishes to have.

‘You first,’ said Olivia.

‘I wish to dream myself... living in the usual,’ said Ingalawa. ‘No alarums in the streets, no prison walls, no soldiers. Instead, the Dromdanjerie as always. My own room, my own bed, the peace within my own mosquito net.’

Ingalawa was a skilled dreamer with years of training and experience behind her. Since that was her chosen dream that was surely what would grace her sleep that night.

‘I wish,’ said Olivia, still soothing the comb through the free-flowing fantasy of her hair, ‘I wish ... I wish the same.’