Till Human Voices Wake Us (2 page)

There was very little left for him to do, in fact, three days before the end of the Game. Down below London he had the border with Eahh to close, and then tomorrow there was the final temporary closure of the others to accomplish. He hoped it would be temporary.

And then … and then … just prepare himself for the end of the world. Or rather prepare the magic of the world, the stuff of his duty, for what would happen if he lost on Wednesday. If he lost he would not be doing anything. The rules of the Game were very clear on that point. This might well be the last walk he ever took with Will, perhaps even his last walk through the night city.

One of the things he most enjoyed was walking at night in fine rain. It had been many years since he could do so safely with a friend, and for a moment he was awash in gratitude for such a gift. Will continued silent, which let Raphael tuck away that small pleasure into a corner of his mind, like a potted plant in a Gothic cathedral. Pleasant and a bit ridiculous, a bit of gilding on a rhinoceros’ horn.

When they reached the river Will stopped to look over the railings at the dim light-spangled water. The tide was well on its way out; the moon was a glow near the western horizon, behind the buildings. They were near Raphael’s house, which was invisible to all eyes but his. He carefully did not let his gaze rest on it.

Will said, “I find it curious how much deeper the river is now.”

Four hundred years ago Will’s Thames had been awash with noxious mudflats, not tamed until the Victorians’ engineering. The building of the embankment had moved Raphael’s house and grounds from an island in the river to part of the city proper, though of course the builders hadn’t known that. Raphael lit one of his house lamps with a soft thrust of magic. “The effect of channelling it.”

“I should think that would make it more likely to flood.”

“There are gates at Greenwich in case of a storm and a flood tide come together.”

“Truly? I shall have to go see them. Have they been proved? Would not high water from upstream together with high winds and the tide overmaster them?—A fine image to use, this channelled river.”

He started sauntering downstream. Raphael looked at the bulk of the hill in the darkness behind his walls. He felt an untoward sense of dislocation at the knowledge that Will could not even see the wall, let alone the hill, didn’t know that there behind old magics was where Raphael lived. He swirled the breeze around him restlessly until it prickled his magic.

Will bounced his umbrella along the railing in iambic pentameters. “Audiences nowadays appear to wish for more—ah—verisimilitude. They shouldn’t like it were I to write about the bounded river in a play about Orpheus or Agamemnon.”

“Would you see Agamemnon a bounded river?” Raphael asked, tasting the magic running through the Thames, a gorgeous netting of energies, lacework of air and currents, dreams and stories and fishy activities, life and death and the steady rush from the city to the sea. It was cleaner than it had been for centuries. He’d heard people even wanted to develop a swimming beach on the Isle of Dogs next summer. Not something he’d much fancied doing since Roman times.

“Not directly, of course, but the image runs through my thoughts, this river through a city with its flood gates. What is Agamemnon’s story if not a life bounded?”

“He chooses between duty and inclination.”

“Between duty to his family and that to his friends.”

Raphael considered the versions of the story he knew. “Family and family: Iphigeneia his daughter or Menelaus his brother. The goddess or the army: his conscience or necessity.”

“Perhaps he was a man who had bounded his conscience with walls and flood gates, and then all breaks upon him at once and his artifices fail. Prohibitions and the Trojan War.”

“There were dykes and gates in ancient Mesopotamia, but the Mycenaeans were seafarers. There aren’t any major rivers in Greece.”

“It’s a metaphor,” Will said caustically, “James. Why are you in
Hamlet
 
?”

Raphael blinked at the sudden shift. He had accepted the role because of an old promise to Robin, half-forgotten until redeemed. He’d started off reluctant and resentful of the time it took away from his duties, then become grateful for the ordinary demands of the familiar structure of rehearsals and performance, and finally come to depend on entering Hamlet as a release from the dire refrain of
should he—shouldn’t he—should he—shouldn’t he
in his unoccupied mind. He settled for, “Robin asked me.”

“Honest Iago.”
 

He was touched by this, as Will usually refused to play the game of quotations; if somewhat miffed by the choice of which particular allusion to bring in. “Honey-tongued Will. I am sure you could persuade us that Acheron ran through Argos.”

“If you insist, I have also considered the shape of the story of Orpheus the musician. He was of
 
Thrace in the stories; there could be a river there. And indeed he did cross Acheron.”

“It would be a complex play with both Agamemnon and Orpheus to treat.”

“I have a ready pen; I can write more than one. They would pair well in some ways. Orpheus came to a confliction of desires, not duties. But in both there are the prohibitions.”

“There are duties in that story.”
 

“He chose to enter the land of the dead for his love. That is a fine tale indeed, but what duties are there? He flouted the human duty of obeying necessity for the higher love of—what shall we call his Eurydice?”

“It seems even less like a river,” Raphael observed, carefully tucking a few loose strands of magic back into their places.

“Even better: the farther from the reality, the better the analogy. Consider the man who loves enough to follow his beloved into the land of the dead! What is she? His soul? His art? His muse? I would follow my muse far and away.”

“You did follow her to Fairyland.”

“And you? How far would you follow yours?”

“I have none.”

“Honest Iago! Your voice goes flat, your shoulders tense, your hand gestures a dismissal half-seen in the glimmered reflections cast upon you by the river. Truly you have no muse. Very well. Do you seek one? Your assignations of the older days and now: what of them? Are they your search for a light to light your way?”

“They are errands, nothing more.” Errands of his duty to Ysthar, he called them to himself. He made his shoulders relax, settled himself again into character: the openly pseudonymous James, Will’s friend and Robin’s, well known to the magic folk of Ysthar as a small mage, vaguely connected with the reclusive Lord of
 
Ysthar; a far cry from the glittering film star James Inelu, or indeed the splendid lord magus; or himself.

“Errands—fine word! Whither do you wander on your errands? What path do you stray from? Shall I use you as my model? Are they after pleasures or duties or both? Agamemnon chooses duty, aye, but perhaps his tragedy is that he prefers his duty to his conscience.”

“I should be concerned indeed to know I was your model for all the characters you’ve written me to play.”

“
Honest
Iago.”

Raphael thrust his hands into his pockets and considered some responses of varying wit and temper to that. Not that he’d played Iago for Will. By the time he thought of what to say, he had drawn ahead, Will having stopped to retie his shoelace. Realizing he was a hundred yards ahead Raphael turned back to see three figures advance out of the narrow alley between two converted warehouses.

By the time he covered the distance Will was down, his balance compromised. Raphael felt a faint affinity with that warrior Agamemnon as he strode into the affray, laying about with elbow and edge of hand and foot and Will’s dropped umbrella. He fought as cleanly as was compatible with a quick victory, his self-imposed rules to avoid causing permanent injury or using magic. The men were thugs, not skilled assassins, and, though certainly sent by Circe, were not expecting his skill. Perhaps forty seconds passed before they fled.

Raphael did use his magic to assure himself of privacy while he pulled Will upright. The poet was breathing heavily, his eyes narrowed with surprise, indignation, and pain, fear not yet fully present.

“How are you hurt?”

Will spat, coughed weakly, spat again. “A buffet to the stomach. Faugh.”

Raphael let his adrenalin diminish, heart thundering. He was astonished at how angry he was. It was the last week of the Game; by its fourth rule he was not to be the object of attack. He had felt safe to walk with his friend, and here he had brought him into danger.

Will unbent slowly. “I shall be sore upon the morrow.” He peered around nervously, caught Raphael’s calm gesture. “You’re not afeared they’ll return?”

“No.”

“Shall we report it?”

“No. Can you walk?”

“I’m bruised, not broken. Aye.” He gasped as he took a step, but Raphael saw from his movements there were no injuries beyond the battering. “What of you? That was a magnificent rout. I’ve rarely seen you brawl before.”

“I’m fine. We should get you home.”

Will nodded shakily and grasped him by the elbow. Raphael let him lean, bounding his step to Will’s slower one. He picked the shortest route towards Robin’s Belgravia townhouse, which took them through the City instead of along the river. It was perhaps half past twelve in the morning, and the moon had set behind the Isle of Dogs. Alert now, Raphael was unafraid of taking narrow alleys, covered mews, strange routes that he knew from many a midnight ramble through London.

As he led Will into the dark crack between a bank and a church his friend said, “Are you certain we should take this way?”

“It’s most direct.”

“I’ll grant that, but we’ve been attacked out of a dark alley once this evening. Or I have. You sent them off with dispatch.”

“I’m sorry. I doubt we’ll be attacked again. I’m watching now.”

“A comfort indeed. You know who those men were?”

“I know who sent them.”

“Your errands take you into darker corners than ever I suspected.” Raphael led him at this sideways along a garden wall, through an ivy-hidden gate, and finally up via a series of stepped walls onto a roof-line that afforded them a view of north London as an ink sketch against scudding clouds. Will gasped slightly. “And also to finer vistas.”

Raphael leaned against a wide, warm chimney so Will could rest. As the echoes of their soft footsteps quieted he took note of the new CCTV cameras since his last jaunt along this route. He fitted them into other known dangers: the hollow roof that boomed under an unwary step, the narrow railing that Will probably could not have managed to cross even uninjured, the lit portions and the jump and the hidey-holes of people and things he did not want to deal with at the moment.

“Who did send them?”

“I have an enemy,” he replied, deciding on the route. “I’m very sorry you were caught in it. I wasn’t paying enough attention. I cry you mercy.” He paused, waiting for the clouds to flood the landscape with a grey wash. “It would be better to be quiet this next stretch.”

“I defer to your wider experience, as the river said to the sea.”

Raphael thought that was perhaps something Will had heard from Robin. With careful haste he brought him home over the rooftops to where Robin’s servant Zebulun awaited with a fire and wine and a nod for Raphael’s murmured comment that they’d had a slight scuffle. Will let himself be bundled off with his only parting comment being, “It is a great gift to have good light; I shall be able to write another hour yet before bed.”

He didn’t say whether he was inspired by the river or the fight or the conversation, and Raphael, turning his attention back towards his duties, did not ask him.
 

Chapter Two

Views from the Underground

He strode south through a series of winding alleys given over to the peculiar businesses between Belgravia and Westminster, shabby cafés in the bottoms of government buildings and purveyors of ecclesiastical odds and ends. Walking briskly and silently he reached the river not far from Vauxhall Bridge.

A ladder descended to the river near it. He clambered over the railing and stood at length on the mud of the river bed, near an opening in the embankment that would let him into the under parts of the city. A fog was rolling up along the inky river counter to its ebb tide.

His vision adjusted slowly to the deeper darkness. He felt his direction more by way of magic than by sight. He sometimes saw a glimpse of stone or water, but more often he saw the shapes of corners and hollows by the sinuous motion of ribbons and pools and threads and upswellings of magic.

Sometimes he wondered if he might, ghostlike, be missing half the solidity of the undergirdings of the city; he caught himself every once in a while halfway between a wall and the river, or standing with no awareness of how he had come to be there in the middle of some subterranean lake, or catching a glimpse of a sudden silver streak as the Tube wound its own way apart from him.

He came quite close to the lowest of the Tube lines, drawn there by a faint intimation of danger. It was not strictly speaking on his path, but he made his way to the shadows opposite the platform, beyond the edge where the light fades but where there was still room to stand between the train and the wall. There was a woman on the platform, standing alone and obviously nervous about the two men laughing and joking roughly at the other end. Raphael waited a moment, watching.

There was a bottle of ginger beer by the woman’s foot. One of the men pushed the other so he stumbled towards her and she started, knocking the bottle. It rolled off the edge of the platform and landed with an attention-catching chink on the line.

The bottle did not break on impact, but spun quivering. It lay spinning on the rail as the pressure built for only a few moments: but when it exploded the woman and one of the men shrieked.

All three laughed, and the tension shattered with equal finality. When the train pulled up in a blast of stale air Raphael felt no qualms leaving her to get on. He himself went through a cleft in the wall opposite him and continued downwards.