The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 (44 page)

Slowly the
Indigo Pheasant
veered away. Maggie and the others with telescopes saw the figure in the attic cross the window several more times, whether it was someone pacing or someone dragging something along the floor or aught else, no one onboard wished to investigate.

The ship continued on its anfractuous journey, “winding through neathes, nighs and flows, into ever-eve across the straits of mourning.” The Great Fulginator reckoned steadily and true, producing a densely figured music that held at bay the despair bred by the interrugal lands, and that pierced the folds and margins of xanthrophicius seas. All hearts on board were tuned intimately to the Fulginator’s music. The whales and dolphins sang along with it, the birds that surrounded the ship beat their wings in time to it, the clock on the mast ticked and tocked to it.

Charicules, who perched most of each day in the Fulgination Room, created a running melody matching that of the Great Fulginator. Dorentius was convinced that the Fulginator had begun to respond to the saulary’s singing, quite independent of any human intervention. Maggie was not wholly convinced, but neither did she dispute the claim.

As the sun set on the thirty-first day, the
Indigo Pheasant
arrived at Sanctuary, on the shoulder of Yount. Those on shore perceived the ship far out to sea, as a gliding palace of light chasing the shadows before it, a choir boat the size of a billowing mountain, pouring out song upon the waters, song that splashed higher than the surf breaking on rocks. Singing “The Thanksgiving Carol” and “The Arrival Song” in several languages, a great multitude crowded the deep-water harbour at Sanctuary to greet the
Indigo Pheasant
—and in the very forefront stood Jambres, the Cretched Man.

“Be most welcome, Lucid Aleph, Primal Music, shadow-stripped archetype of book and song,” said Jambres to Maggie and the others as they descended the gangplank from the
Indigo Pheasant
. The choir boat was tied up along side the
Seek-by-Night
, whose masts were adorned with lamps to honour the far-travellers.

The crew and passengers of the
Indigo Pheasant
spent a month at Sanctuary, recovering from the journey and planning the final leg of the expedition. Many were the meetings and reunions, making of the respite a joyous time (if tempered by knowledge of what must come next). Tommy Two-Fingers had baggins on the beach with Billy Sea-Hen, sometimes joined by Afsana and Nexius Dexius, sometimes by Reglum Bammary or Captain Shufflebottom—veterans swapping stories of desperate affrays and brave assaults under different suns. Maggie and Sally spent many hours with Afsana, often including Mei-Hua in the discussions and also the little Malchen (no longer so very little).

Sally and Tom talked long, in the low, short-hand voices of very close siblings. Sally sobbed often, but never in sight of others, unless it was Uncle Barnabas or Sanford.

Queen Zinnamoussea and the chamberlain were honoured guests. There was much talk of the continuing war against the Ornish.

Isaak explored every inch of Sanctuary. She batted at the nose of the knuckle-dog before making tentative friends with the beast. And she enjoyed dining in the company of the Queen.

Charicules played with the parrots and finches in the trees, and sang with the conures and lorikeets in the hedges. He formed a fast attachment with Malchen—the two could be found day and night singing to one another in a language of their own devising.

“Buttons and beeswax,” said Barnabas on dozens of occasions. He cried more than once (many times, in fact), and paraded around in the finest vests his thinner purse could afford.

Afsana said to Maggie (the two were friendly from the start) that she thought she had seen Sanford shed a tear as well.

“He’s a peculiar old spike, an honest razor,” said Afsana. “Whose conscience is so keen it cuts itself.”

“That he is; he reminds me of a pheasant, in truth, of the
Indigo Pheasant
itself,” agreed Maggie. “‘He is come unto the shrine of the blessed, shriven to his meats and mindings.’ He will never fail us.”

Maggie spent more time with Jambres than with anyone else while on Sanctuary. They talked long about the Owl and the making of the Great Song to liberate Yount. He told her all that he knew of the judgment against Yount and the mandates of an idly irate heaven, a lengthy backward-leaping historiography steeped in woe.

“That you have invaded the Owl’s own house, even one of his lesser redoubts, astounds me,” Jambres shook his head. “‘His are the habitats of misery, abode of sorrows deep-ditched, inhabited by undergraduated creatures whose breath goeth outwards into the void.’”

“He was even more astounded than you,” said Maggie, with a grim smile quickly fading. “Yet I could not vanquish him, only put him off a little while, perhaps.”

“Such as Strix are not to be vanquished,” said Jambres quietly, his gaze fixed on the sea-horizon. “He is immortal, beyond our ability to harm.”

“But we can surely defeat him, thwart his will,” said Maggie, with such conviction that Jambres turned to look fully upon her.

“I have spoken with the Mother herself,” added Maggie. “I respect the immortal order of the universe . . . but I do not fear it, nor will I bow my head to it or any of its less-just laws.”

“Was it not Symphorien,” said Jambres. “Or maybe Longinus (my mind has too many drawers for rapid retrieval!), who asserted ‘to achieve the sublime, we must aspire to a great and vigourous concept, founded upon the rock of never-ending passion’? Such is this mad folly you propose, and now we are come to its final throw.”

As they spoke together, day after day, they noticed changes in the Cretched Man’s apparel and skin, so subtle that at first they ignored or denied them. Gradually, however, they realized that the sutures of his coat and leggings were beginning to pucker, sag and open. His white skin began to peel in wispy strips, floating up from his body like gossamer caught in the rays of the sun.

“After the embates and blows of a raw fortune, I hesitate to hope,” whispered Jambres, his usually distant eyes focused on Maggie’s face, which was equally intent. “My imagination runs me uncommon riot, all my long-locked desires are too easily roused free.”

Maggie reached out her hand, stroked his face. He shut his eyes. Neither spoke.

In the final weeks, Maggie rehearsed the Great Song with the choir many times on board the
Indigo Pheasant
, over and over again on the wharves of the little harbour and along the beaches.

“The Seven Singers shall lead us, and the Sons and Daughters of Asaph shall be the first followers,” she said. “But the verse is in all of us, all human beings across all of time and wherever we might find ourselves—it is our birthright. In our battle for self-mastery, we here are representatives only of the entire family, not the entire clan or clade itself. Remember that, oh choristers brave!”

In the final weeks, Maggie checked and re-checked the calculations for the Great Fulginator, working closely with Dorentius, Jambres, Sally, Afsana and Mei-Hua. They tested the steam engine and all the connecting, propulsive and relaying machinery.

“Well, Charicules, what do you think?” asked Dorentius, as they concluded their last preparations.

Charicules trained a bright eye on Dorentius and whistled. Even the sceptical Maggie laughed.

That evening Maggie said over a farewell feast on the beach, “We sail tomorrow morning to Yount to confront the Owl. Jambres and a hand-picked crew will accompany us on the
Seek-by-Night.
Otherwise—and besides the beloved whales and dolphins, and some of our friends among the birds—we are quite alone on this endeavour.”

Everyone cheered Jambres and the crew of the
Seek-by-Night.

“And Isaak! We have the cat-warrior on our side!” yelled Tom.

Isaak walked the length of the head-table, her golden coat glowing in the candlelight for the entire gathering to admire.

“The
tess muddry
, the
tess muddry
,” chanted the Yountians, and everyone picked up the cry.

“Well cousin,” shouted Barnabas, as the chanting subsided. “What’s the plan? We’re just going to sail right at ’em, is that it?”

“Yes, cousin,” said Maggie. “We must be eagles to an owl. We will go right at him!”

More cheers.

“We can handle ’im!” yelled Barnabas, waving an invisible sword in one hand and a bottle of Burgundy in the other (a long-ago gift from the lawyer Sedgewick, brought all the way from Mincing Lane and saved for just such an occasion).

“Remember the
Lanner
!” yelled the many Yountians—most of them refugees from Ornish slave mines and plantations who had escaped to the Cretched Man’s Sanctuary.

“For King and Country, for Britons shall never ever be slaves!” yelled many of the travellers from London.

Mei-Hua, Shaozu and Tang Guozhi sang a song from China. Malchen sang a hymn from Germany, Afsana a prayer from Gujarat. Songs from Tamil-land and Mali, from Ireland and Igbo-land, from Yoruba-land and Conakry followed in rapid succession, accompanied by energetic drumming, clapping and the stamping of feet from all quarters.

They were ready.

The following day the
Indigo Pheasant
, together with the
Seek-by-Night
and three-score whales and dolphins, with dozens of petrels dancing along the sea before them and dozens of fulmars and albatrosses soaring the air above them, sailed through the haze and catch-moans that walled Yount.

They arrived in Yountish waters. The waves were calm in an open sea, under a pale-grey noontime sky.

. . . A sky in which, as if a giant had suddenly opened an enormous casement window, a rent appeared, of sharply defined night scattered with tiny bright stars and centred by a large, bulbous moon.

Looking up into the sky, as the albatrosses wheeled away from the slit in the heavens, Maggie and everyone else on the two choir boats could see framed there a dessicated landscape under the impossibly distant moonlight. Row upon row of pillars marched across the undulating bone-plains. Atop each pillar perched a frog or donkey or woodpecker or other creature the size of a house, each winged, each possessing eyes alive with ancient intelligence and unblinking vigilance.

An owl lifted itself off a pillar and flew towards the gap in the sky. It flew through the gap and into Yount, two long pennant tails rippling behind it. One by one and then by twos, threes and fours, others rose off their pillars and flapped their way behind Strix.

Strix hovered just off the bow of the
Indigo Pheasant
. His fellows drifted down in serpentine rows, through defiles unseen in the taut air, braking with their membranous wings, swerving, circling. One of them blurred as it swooped down, became a beautiful woman with jet-black hair swirling in the oceanic breeze. Dressed in an impeccable green gown, the creature known in England as the Widow Goethals and also as Mrs. Hamilton alighted gracefully on the bowsprit of the
Seek-by-Night
.

“Hooo, HOOOOOOM,” spoke the Owl, eyes reflecting both Yount’s pale sun and the faint gleam of the moon in the marcher-lands outside. “If I commanded you to turn aside now in this very final instance from your arrogant and foolish plan, would you? Nay, you would not—you are committed recklessly to wickedness, the consequences of which you are too small to understand.”

No one on either ship said anything. Isaak hissed at the Owl.

“Silence, cat!” said Strix. “Your owners indulge your vanity.”

Sally started forward, stood right behind Isaak.

“Oh HOH!” laughed the Owl, his eyes glittering, his bill snapping. “You should know better,
ma petite femme brisée, ébranlée
. You are bereft of authority in this matter. You lost that, well, with James Kidlington, did you not?”

Sally flinched. Barnabas and Sanford stepped to her side.

From the
Seek-by-Night
, Jambres called out a challenge.

“SSSsssssss,” hissed the Owl. “You, traitor, have even less authority here. Your mutiny astonishes me only a little less than your measureless impudence in showing yourself to me now. You will receive no mercy in the Houses of Redemption, that is the only promise I will make to you!”

Jambres said nothing further but he did not alter his stance or drop the level of his gaze.

The green-gowned half-angel on the bowsprit of the
Seek-by-Night
turned and said something to Strix in a language so old that the stars themselves were new when it was first uttered. The Owl flew a figure-of-eight and then laughed so the indigo sails dimpled.

“Indeed,” he said to Jambres, in a voice that reached into the souls of all present. “Do you truly believe that the bright, angelic circle will part for you, as a result of your creeping efforts to reconcile yourself with the Redeemer? Oh, tenderest of thy kind, ‘last seduced and least deformed,’ as your poet has it! Falsely lustrous you have been in all eyes, Jambres. Nay, you will not be granted annihilation, your penance shall be without end and no action of yours can dispel it.”

Billy Sea-Hen and Tommy Two-Finger moved forward to flank Jambres. The Widow Goethals brandished her conjure-hands, Astarte summoning the words of permanent exile.

Jambres spread wide his arms and began to sing, a wordless chant, wavering and not entirely in any key. Billy and Tom did their best to join in.

The Widow sang green ribbons of sorcery to bind the Cretched Man. Jambres struggled but withstood the enchantment.

He called out . . . and Maggie answered with a song of her own.

The two sides vied for a long minute, two, three.

Charicules flew at the witch on the
Seek-by-Night
’s bowsprit, circled her with scherzi that delighted the ear as they battled the grinding will to imprison.

Jambres gave a mighty yell. His seething red coat popped open, likewise his trousers, sloughing off him in bloody strips, falling in a pile around his feet onto the deck. Shouting in anguish and hope and disbelief intermingled, Jambres felt his skin pulling off his body.

Maggie sang and Jambres sang, repelling the whorled melody of the Owl and of the Widow Goethals . . . and reversing an edict pronounced millennia ago in Egypt, when Jambres and his brother were wizards in the court of the Pharaoh, wizards who chose to combat Moses and Aaron.