Memory Seed (13 page)

CHAPTER 11

On Beltayn Eve, Haquyn, acolyte of the Goddess, chaperoned children around southern Kray, helping them in their task of decorating twigs and branches earlier snapped off by defending groups. The younger children – at least, those who did not spend time teasing their elder siblings – made crossed hoops of bedecked cane, straw dolls and garlands for decoration.

Meanwhile thousands of young friends met at inns serving free ale throughout the night. From safe roofs and from the open windows of high towers came the sounds of horns and drums, klaxons and conches, and reed pipes three yards long, accompanying the festivities.

But in the Green and the Archaic Quarters, in the passable districts of the Andromeda Quarter – even down as far as the Temple of Felis – and in those parts of the Carmine Quarter smothered by plants overflowing from the Gardens, there was silence. Silence, except for the swishing of trees and the pattering of rain. North Kray heard no music. This year, Beltayn was confined.

At sunrise Arrahaquen returned to the Carmine Quarter with her charges, everyone singing, then let them go in order to begin the house decoration; well-liked people would be favoured with flowers and leaves around their windows and doors, while the unpopular had nettles and creepers thrust upon them. Gifts could then be requested from Kray’s older residents. Arrahaquen looked upon all this with the eye of one who had lived most of her life in the bland buildings of the Citadel.

Collecting Zinina from the house, Arrahaquen led the way to a dew pool. It was the custom for women to bathe their faces with dew to ensure what in Kray was the ultimate beauty – a clear complexion.

An hour after dawn, they walked south. A light mist of yellow drizzle fell from bright clouds, filling the air. Already, feats of strength, singing and dancing, pyuter graphics and archery were being exhibited in the streets. Food and drink was to hand in every road – free from the Food and the Water Stations. Arrahaquen gazed east towards the Citadel. Somewhere atop its summit the Portreeve would be sitting at breakfast, apart, with a sour face.

Mystical figures appeared as the dances became more boisterous. The Leaf Man, a woman jigging in a bulky costume, danced along the street, flowers and coloured ribbons decorating her face. Elsewhere stalked the Moll and the Fool, the latter, dressed all in white and attended by girls in white jumpsuits, attacking those already drunk with a bladder affixed to a hazelstick. Arrahaquen, not quite able to join in with the jollity, feigned insolence and was rewarded with a clout on the head. Zinina laughed at her, but Arrahaquen’s face remained glum.

They walked on. The drizzle stopped, though the sky remained overcast. Music swelled from windows and from street bands led by aamlon conductors with leaves in their cuffs. Noon passed by. The two women walked to the garland-strewn Market Square, where this year’s Kray Queen was to be crowned. It would be a momentous occasion for many since it was widely believed that today marked the city’s final Beltayn. Girls wreathed in flowers danced around poles, the slabs below their feet a ring of colour where their adornments had fallen away. Others sat on leafy posts that they had made, comparing size and quality with those of others. From behind a vacated post Arrahaquen watched the tall, blonde and rather mysterious priestess Tashyndy crowned. She had nominated herself Kray Queen on Vert Day.

Taziqi, the High Priestess of the Goddess, had departed the temple to see her spiritual student crowned. People avoided her. Dressed in a sheath of lime and emerald silk, emeralds on her fingers and toes, she wore a three-faced mask, to the left a maiden, central a woman, to the right an old woman. When she spoke in encouragement, silence fell.

Arrahaquen studied Taziqi in fascination. Brought up to believe that any High Priestess of the Goddess was an enemy of the Portreeve, she now looked upon Taziqi with awe and confusion. What secrets did she possess? What were her plans for this final year? Well, any plans remained just as secret as those of the Portreeve, for the Temple of the Goddess had ventured no method of saving the human race.

Escaping the crowning festivities, they wandered down Ash Lane. Final customs were being enjoyed. At the harbour, women threw wax effigies of men into the water.

It was as the day waned that, returning north, they came across a street party composed mainly of jannitta women, and Zinina insisted that they stay to enjoy the last festivities. Zinina was tipsy, and starting to sing badly. Arrahaquen sat on a log and watched. She had not been there long when a short woman approached her, dressed in poor sackcloth, her scalp scarred, her face green-spotted and wrinkled. ‘Excuse me, would you be able to assist my poorly daughter?’

‘Um,’ Arrahaquen said, glancing towards Zinina but failing to catch her eye. ‘I’ll take a brief peep. I have to be back at the temple, you know.’

‘Most kind.’

The woman led her into an alley, but turned almost immediately and took from her pocket a piece of paper and a pencil. ‘Do you know who this is?’ she asked, turning the paper so that Arrahaquen saw a face. Suddenly she was frightened, knowing that this woman was not what she seemed.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Who are you?’

‘More to the point, who are you?’ The woman smiled and pointed the pencil at Arrahaquen’s face. There was a hiss and an acid smell... then blackness.

~

A cold rain fell from grey-black clouds. East of that dismal park where the Cowhorn Tower leaned over the Cemetery, from somewhere near the Gardens, came the sounds of gunfire.

It was Beltayn evening.

Two figures walked along a path nestling between the Cemetery wall and the pleasure garden which surrounded the Cowhorn Tower. The path followed a sinuous depression, its grit and glass surface crunching as the two pairs of boots passed by.

One figure, Hains – a man – wore a plastic suit with the hood drawn tight, and leather thigh boots. He was tall and strong. Tashyndy, the new Kray Queen, glanced down at her own clothes, ensuring that he could not see her face under the cotton balaclava and cowl. Her robe was scarlet, trimmed with black leaves. Crimson gloves covered her hands.

They turned off the lane and climbed a short path up to the Cowhorn Tower, where they paused. A hum emanated from its two prongs, caused by the wind passing through at a certain speed off the sea. Fifty yards up, these horns shed water. Below, the bulk of the tower, an irregular copper ovoid forty yards across supported on a pillar half as wide, showed verdigris through the rain. The horns, curving around, with their spherical end knobs, seemed like tentacles with eyes daring them to continue. They walked towards the tower’s only door, made of steel.

It was not the first time that Tashyndy had entered the Cowhorn Tower. The smell of fish tainted with musk was familiar, bringing to mind a similar odour in the Fish Chambers. It excited her, and made her clutch Hains’ arm. The endometrial walls of the main chamber consisted of a spiral arcade of niches, reached by steps and a collection of spiral staircases, and lit by rows of yellow lamps.

From above came cries and sighs, occasionally gasps. Every human voice was echoed by the same voice – the deep, rich voice of the Cowhorn Tower, a voice that often frightened newcomers away.

Tashyndy said, ‘Shall we find a soft chamber?’

‘Yes... yes,’ replied Hains, head held back as he stared up at the structures around him.

‘Is this your first time?’

He paused. She knew he had not been here before. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not the first. Though I wouldn’t say I was a regular.’

As he told this lie Tashyndy’s mind was drawn to a package wrapped in leaves, carried in her pocket. She thought she could feel it against her skin. She shivered.

‘All right?’ he whispered.

In reply she led him to a staircase, which they climbed, ascending to the lower bowl of the main chamber. Amidst the niches and alcoves set into the outer wall and curtained off from the gangways, she saw illuminated cysts and crevices, many ice-covered. Above and around she spied drones, ranging in size from insect to dog, ticking as they scuttled around on their unknown tasks. Many were damp, or covered with sticky fluid, while others seemed to be restricted in movement by ice as though they were rheumatic.

The pair ascended further into the bowl, echoes following them. Drones clicked by, on legs, wheels, or squeaking treads, while others navigated the walls like spiders. The continual hum, the melange of sound and echo, drummed into Tashyndy’s brain and she longed to be behind a curtain, a thick curtain that would diminish the noise.

At the left horn she located a chamber, pulled Hains in, and drew the curtain. She sat him on the couch.

The alcove was warm, lit by a goblet of luminous plankton, with a sumptuous circular couch. ‘Now, wait here. You might like to get undressed now. Or I’ll do it for you.’

‘Maybe–’

‘I think I’d like you to undress while I’m out. But I’ll be back in a minute, ready for you.’

He nodded, masking his confusion. Hains was a reveller, plucked last autumn off the streets and allowed to become healthy again in the secluded gazebos behind the Goddess’s temple. But it was important that he not be anxious, so she stroked him and made a cosy place in the couch, then took a flask of baqa from her cloak pocket and offered it to him.

Outside, she removed her cloak, boots and underwear. She checked her reflection in a capsule cover dark enough inside to act as a mirror. Her skin was red, dyed during the night with a concoction of alizarin red, wine and oil, her lips were painted black, her hair was slicked back with ochre, and brown spots decorated her thighs. She stroked herself, then returned to Hains.

He was shocked at her appearance. ‘Do all Kray Queens do that?’

‘That?’ she replied, her mind already becoming hazy.

‘Paint themselves.’

‘It’s a tradition,’ she said, pushing him down on the couch and sitting on him. A drone sidled into their alcove.

He was not an imaginative enough lover to see that fun was the point of the day.

‘Don’t do that,’ she murmured. ‘Relax. Trust me, you’re with the Kray Queen.’

She wriggled under him and drew her cloak nearer to her right hand, plumping it up as he moved above her so that the package in the pocket was within reach, drawing her legs back and up so he could find a comfortable position. Other machines crawled under the couch.

Then Hains began to reinterpret her wishes. ‘Why don’t I–’

‘Just... just enjoy yourself, Hains. Don’t get so bossy.’

‘I’m not bossy.’

The machines under their couch ticked to themselves. Petulantly, he asked, ‘Don’t I get a chance to say what to do?’

‘No. That’s the whole point.’

He rose up above her, his attention elsewhere. Tashyndy reached for the package, found the base of the cat-claw, and held it in its leaf glove while he lectured her. Then, as he ran out of things to say, she scratched his back. He turned, and saw the fluid on the point of the claw.

With a shove of her thighs and belly, Tashyndy threw him off the couch. She had hoped this would not happen. But Hains had tried to dominate where there was no need to dominate. He lay twitching, staring at her, trying to say something. Slowly the haze of sex withdrew from her mind. Her senses lost a feeling of unity that they had previously enjoyed, and the heat, movement, colour, bodies, sounds, smells, touches were all fragmented.

The drone pyutons sprang upon the bed like silverfish as she dressed herself and she watched them scrape at the damp patches. She reversed the cloak, showing an olive colour trimmed with black leaves. Opening the curtain let in a little light. Hains was dead. One drone lifted his penis and began cutting away at his scrotum. As Tashyndy pulled on her boots, the drone extracted his balls. She put on the balaclava, pulled up the cowl, and departed humming a sun-mantra. The drones followed later, placing their cargo in a capsule around which ice lay thick.

Standing at the bottom of the Cowhorn Tower, Tashyndy sadly contemplated the failure of which she had been a part. Today’s events had epitomised the disappointment of men and women of earlier generations.

She watched other drone pyutons carrying their cargoes around the place. For forty years the Cowhorn Tower had stood here, storing human seed much as a gardener stored plant seed. She wondered how much longer it would survive, and why the drones carried on regardless.

~

Graaff-lin found herself unable to cope with what had happened. Her deities, the Dodspaat, had collaborated in a Citadel plot. But she could not be angry with them. Not one of the twenty could she harangue as they lay remote, thinking their dead thoughts, ignoring her like a bad mother ignores a daughter. It made her feel sick.

She knew she had no choice but to excommunicate herself from the Temple of the Dodspaat. Remaining a part of it would be tantamount to heresy. All she had to do was refuse to perform her ecclesiastical duties three times in succession and it would be done. So far, she had failed to turn up at the temple twice. She knew she could not return. Mysrioque would have her arrested and sent to the Citadel, for Graaff-lin did not doubt that the new High Priestess was in the service of the Portreeve, and very likely was Katoh-lin’s replacement in the Red Brigade too. How appalling that the faith of the Dodspaat should be so perverted.

Her next official office was due some hours hence, starting on the first minute after Beltayn. If she did not appear to minister to the Dodspaat and to the public, she would automatically be recorded as excommunicated.

She sat alone in the house. Zinina was out searching for Arrahaquen, who had not appeared since they had lost each other earlier that evening. Graaff-lin cared not where Arrahaquen had gone.

Midnight drew near. Gunfire could be heard from the soggy groves and fungal alleys of the Green Quarter. It was expected that the north-eastern wall of the Gardens would soon collapse, and the Gardens and Green Quarter would merge to become one vast forbidden area, bordered to the north by the Venus Trap, to the east by the lonely, eerie ruins of the Andromeda Quarter, to the south by the Mercantile Quarter, and to the west by that narrow strip of land that was the Carmine Quarter. Soon, Graaff-lin realised, the entire north of the city would be uninhabitable. Automatic gunfire again disturbed her thoughts.