Time's Mistress (21 page)
Authors: Steven Savile
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Short Stories & Anthologies, #anthologies, #Short Stories, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Fantasy, #magical realism, #Single Authors, #Anthologies & Short Stories
I looked for a different photograph, one I knew something about. It was of me and Louise Langeby smiling over the top of huge ice cream sundaes dripping with cola sauce and mint green liqueur. I smiled slightly, remembering just how incredibly competitive Louise had been about everything. In the photograph her hair was pulled up in its usual business-like ponytail, her face sans makeup, pretty but nothing special. I smiled inwardly, wondering what Louise would think of me; people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, right? I rested my fingertip on the photograph and began my long night as Scheherazade, telling stories to save a life.
“This was taken a year after we graduated high school, in an ice cream parlour in Gamla Stan. Wonderful ice cream. We were celebrating because Louise had just landed herself a job as a copy editor with Bonniers.” I stopped thinking about the words I was saying, found myself visualising them instead, reliving the memories …
The inside of the ice cream parlour was cold even though the paraffin heater was pumping out warmth. It had been a stupid idea coming for ice cream in January. Snow lined the street and banked up against the window like a scene from a Christmas card. Louise was really getting on my nerves, all of her talk about Bonniers this and Bonniers that, and the way she curled her lip up whenever she deigned to think about my own fledgling career as a makeup artist at Face. Still, the ice cream was good.
“Tell me about our break-up,” Federico interrupted, breaking the illusion. I looked at the clock, trying to get some sense of how long I had been under, but it was still stuck at three. The neons out in the street prevented the moon from giving any hints.
But it wasn’t the moon I was looking at.
It was Federico.
Only Federico.
Always Federico.
A thin dribble of blood was running from the corner of his mouth, losing itself in the cracks of his chin. He didn’t seem to be aware of it so I reached out to wipe it away but his hand snaked out and grabbed mine, his grip surprisingly strong, hurt. “Don’t,” he hissed, refusing to let go of my hand even when he felt the urge to move fade from my muscles.
I didn’t know what to say. I looked up from the ribbon of blood into his dead eyes. I was wrong; the sky had never lived in them. A flat rolling emptiness of oblivion consumed them. That was all there was to him. Emptiness. Oblivion.
“Tell me about our break-up,” he repeated harshly.
I shook my head, no. His fingers dug into my wrists. Twisting. “Tell me, Caro. You know you will so don’t make me hurt you.” I couldn’t break his hold, no matter how much I wanted to. “Needless pain is such a waste of good suffering.” The more pressure he put on my wrists the more vehemently I shook my head. But I couldn’t help myself; I started
thinking
about it …
The room was dark, for once not bathed in moonlight. Shadows cast by the limbs of the old tree in my parents’ garden danced on the white wall. I watched them trying to put some sort of message into their movement; a subtext about the decline of civilisation and the end of Empire, or something equally bogus. Free spirits that they were, the trees were having nothing to do with it. “I don’t love you anymore,” I said at last, knowing he couldn’t see my eyes. We’d made love less than an hour before. I felt cheap. Dirty. Used. I could never have said the words if he had been looking at me. The darkness gave me the strength to say what we both knew: It was over.
“You were it, Caro.” Federico’s voice was consumed by sadness. Blood was running from both nostrils now. No longer a thin trickle, it was bleeding into the collar of his shirt. He looked as if he had been shot in the neck. “You were
the
one. My North, my South, my East and my West … and you
left
me …”
It really was like an ugly hallucination, the way the past kept overlaying the present with its painful memories.
Something was beginning to happen inside me; I could feel it. Not like Freddie had explained it, not some kind of hairball at the back of my throat. It was in my stomach, a severe cramp, like a period pain but so much more intense. It felt like my womb was on fire and my ovaries were about to burst.
And spill bloody red spiders onto the floor
, that damned voice goaded.
“You left me,” he repeated softly.
I had started crying; I don’t remember when. I
hurt
so much. Inside and out. “I’m sorry,” I managed, trying to curl up into a foetal ball even though he still had my hands. “I’m sorry.”
“Sweet Caroline,” he soothed, lowering me to the floor. One moments softness exchanged for a brutal kick to my belly. A second kick, crunching into my breastbone. “You were always the one … It had to be you … I’m sorry, Caro. If … If I hadn’t loved you, it wouldn’t hurt so much …”
I sobbed, breaking.
I thought I was going to throw up; felt something soft brushing up against me. Deuteronomy. I tried to push him away but my body wouldn’t answer my mind.
Something sounded, a banging, a knock at the door: “Don’t go away now,” Federico whispered, brushing back my hair tenderly before he went to answer the knocking. I tried to move but it was impossible. So I just lay there in a ball, wishing I were dead while the spider of reality crawled inside my ear and whispered:
“Whyyyyy don’t youuuu kill him?”
It was laughable; I couldn’t even move and despite his outward frailty there was steel moving that loose flesh of Federico’s. I didn’t have a hope in Hell.
There were voices but I couldn’t hear what they were saying, not at first. I could just make out Federico’s but the others … some female, I guessed before I finally blacked out.
O O O
A ring of faces surrounded me when I came too. Federico’s dead eyes looking down paternally, Veronica’s still clouded with fairy dust and angels. But there were others. Faces I hadn’t seen since high school. Ania, Louise, Neha, Mary and Elisa, each looking at me as if I had somehow betrayed them. Each face impossibly young, every eye haunted by the kind of emptiness only death can bring. They crowded around me like so many spiders chittering over their prey.
Come to feast.
That was when I felt it; the first dribbles of blood trailing down the inside of my thigh. The pain in my womb, already unbearable, doubled, trebled. I could feel,
literally
feel, something crawling down through the lips of my vagina, hungry to be out in the world. I was screaming and they were all leaning over me and cooing, urging me to give birth.
I was wrong.
There was a lot of blood.
I felt Federico’s fingers on my temples, soothing, gentling. And I felt Federico’s fingers inside my head, picking through my memories, weeding them out, plucking out what he wanted, what he needed.
When it came, the memory was born in the same kind of mucus-covered spider that Freddie had coughed up. This one wore a man’s face, older, it had meant something to me once but now there was nothing, a blank space where this man had been in my life.
Deuteronomy watched the blood-slicked spider as it crawled down my leg, his eyes feral, bright. Instinct took over. The cat lunged, no time for playing with his food. One clawed paw snagged the spider and his open mouth came down instinctively to eat.
Federico was screaming but he couldn’t move with anything approaching the speed or agility of the cat. Deuteronomy finished eating the small spider and turned to consider the old man screeching at him with disinterested eyes.
Good boy
, I urged, biting back on the pain as a second memory began its journey down the birth canal.
Now do it again …
Anything was better than this monster I used to call a friend swallowing my life, my memories, whole … But Deuteronomy wasn’t going to be doing it again. The thing that was Federico saw to that. He took my cat in his hands and began to pull, cracking his ribcage then splitting it open with burrowing fingers, fishing the memory out before it had had a chance to dissolve in Deuteronomy’s stomach acids. Dropping the cat he stuffed the bloody spider into his mouth and swallowed it whole, licking his fingers as if to savour a particularly rare delicacy.
I didn’t have the strength to cry any more than I was already crying. Black holes were opening up inside my skull. Holes were people had lived once upon a time. One by one The Real Thief of Time delivered my memories into the world, memories of Ania and Elisa, Louise, Mary and Neha, the mucus-covered spiders into each of their mouths, bringing back a part of themselves that the Thief had already stolen. They were feeding themselves off me. A swarm of those blood-slicked spiders skittered all over the floor. They just kept pouring out of me, a lifetime of memories. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know who they were anymore; I knew they were feeding off me like vampires, claiming back a month or a year of their stolen age with each swallow.
What they didn’t take Federico devoured, swallowing the chitinous memories down like a glutton, licking his fingers after each mouthful——not to enjoy, I realised distantly, but to drain, to make sure he got each and every last drop of memory soaked blood from them.
And with each one another line was erased from his face, another tendon firmed beneath the slowly tightening skin.
He drank from me until I was empty.
O O O
I lay there on the floor, waiting to die.
But it wasn’t going to be that easy.
They were gone, whoever they were, like ghosts, phantoms, things that never were, never would be.
I was alone with the emptiness inside my head. The blackness that used to house laughter and friendship, lovers and sadness. Everything around me was strange. The floor on which I bled, I’d never seen it before. The music still playing on the stereo, likewise, sounds I had never heard before.
I crawled onto my knees, ignoring the bloody mess of a cat someone had slaughtered. I didn’t recognise the face I saw reflected in the window. A young girl of fourteen or fifteen surrounded by a halo of dawn’s early light. It had to be me but I could have been looking at anyone. Looking at myself I felt the first cramps of period pain coming on. Everything felt stiff. Sore.
Had I been raped? The thought sent a chill shivering down the length of my spine. There was enough blood. And it hurt enough … Oh Jesus … Is that what had happened?
I touched myself tentatively, but it was impossible to tell. Everything felt raw.
I closed my eyes, searching for something inside; some memory that would help make sense of things. Nothingness stretched back for years and years where memories had been, back until it faltered at the foot of a flickering flame … A face … A young boy …
Marcus …
That was his name …
Marcus.
My son.
I looked at myself in the window again. The girl I saw looking back was too young to have a son yet the memory remained, stronger than anything else. More real. Marcus, my son. The one soul I had truly loved in this life of mine. My one. My North, my South, my East and my West.
Somehow, I understood, without knowing how I did, he had the key to me.
Whoever they were, they’d left me one thing, one guiding light, for a reason. Only it wasn’t a light, in the same way that cancer isn’t a light, or AIDS, or cot death. They are ways out, but they aren’t the light at the tunnels’ mouth. His face in my memory was more like the darkest spot in heart of a black hole, sucking up light and sound and everything else greedily. He was everything to me.
I staggered out into the early morning rain, not knowing where I was going, only that I had to find him, find my son and beg him to be my Scheherazade, to tell me my life over a thousand and one nights, to tell me everything: who I am, who I was, who I will be.
The cold hit me, the bone deep chill.
It didn’t matter. I was going to find him and he was going to give me the truth no matter what the cost.
Lovers were huddled in the doorway across the street from the apartment, one impossibly handsome Latino with the whole sky reflected in his eyes, the other an elegant mistress with raven black hair and deep-set haunting eyes. Their fingers intertwined as they watched me pass, a lost soul in a big city of equally lost souls. They smiled gently, like mother and father watching their baby take her first steps, nodding encouragingly as I looked up and down the street, trying to taste my son on the wind.
Like they say, every journey begins with a single step. Putting one foot in front of the other I began walking.
***
Time’s Mistress
“What will the clock make of me, my sweet, sweet Suli?” Immaculada wondered on her death bed.
He took her hand in his tenderly, tracing a finger along the ridge of fine bone standing out against the slack skin. “The clock adores you,” he assured her. “Its love is written in every crease and fold of your flesh, lady. Do not worry about your place in time, Odalisque. You should rest.”
“Flatterer,” she scolded him gently, but her smile told him all he needed to know. Suli smoothed a matted grey curl away from her brow. It pained him to see her like this, so humbled by age. She chuckled at that old name, as though it amused her to be reminded of her innocence. “There will be time enough for that, my boy.” Immaculada lay back in the pillows. Sweat stains soaked into the fabric around her head like some dirty halo. He only had to close his eyes to remember her as she was the first time he had laid eyes upon her: the great beauty of her youth, the olive cast to her skin and the innocence of her deep brown eyes. He could see her now as though it were only a handful of revolutions of her precious ‘clock’ ago.
The old woman never referred to it as time. For her it would only ever be the clock. The rest, she had argued so many times during her long life, was meaningless. Planets could revolve, the clouds ghost across the sky and tides roll in relentlessly and they were merely mechanisms of life but the clock was different, it was a mechanism of precision. Its ticks and tocks were relentless.
She had been such a beautiful child. A miracle. The Sultan’s men had brought her out of the Komark after the fighting had devastated the township. A babe in swaddling clothes. She had no name so Suli had chosen to call her Immaculada, innocence. It had seemed so fitting to him then. Eight thousand people lived camped in the wretched filth and squalor of the Komark, and one by one they had died there in that filth. By dint of survival Immaculada had become the hope of the poor—an innocent soul in the Sultan’s court. No one wanted to remember but neither did they want to forget. There was something altogether more tragic in letting eight thousand souls slip away unremembered. So this little girl with the big brown eyes became so much more than a mere orphan.
“This line,” Suli said, smiling as he traced one of the deep creases across her palm, “this was the first. Your birth line.”
“Read it for me, my love. My eyes are not so good.”
“Of course,” he said, ever the storyteller. “Come with me to the day it all began.” She smiled despite herself. “The darkest day in our people’s history of dark days. It began much as every day had for as long as anyone could remember—with the sounds of fighting and the screams of dying. It was worse though. The civil war had entered its end game. It was funny, no one could tell you when the sun came up. The sky was black. Amid the sounds of war and terror was one note so out of place you couldn’t help but stop and listen in wonder. It was the sound of a baby being born to the world. You, my sweet. No one understood what was happening at the time, of course. How could we? It wasn’t until Uskafel brought you up to the palace that anyone suspected anything out of the ordinary. You were six days old by then. The big man pounded on the heavy doors and, as though in answer, the Sultan’s Perpetual Motion Clock fell silent. They said it was not possible, of course. Time could not stand still, neither could the grand mechanism. The timekeeper swore and huffed and laboured, but it was useless. The clock that could never stop had stopped. The great hourly bell would never cry out again. So, of course, others took it as a sign, pointing fingers at the slaughter of the township. The gods were angry, they cried, these woeful flagellants beating themselves bloody in the main square were right, of course, the gods were angry. And why wouldn’t they be? A few bands of steel had succeeded where centuries of starvation, privation and hardship had failed, but the clock had not ceased its ticking to mark the passing of the dead, far from it, it was honouring you, sweet Odalisque.”
“You old fool, it was nothing of the sort,” she said.
“How would you know? You were six days old, now hush, I am telling the story, not you.”
“Yes, Suli,” she said, smiling indulgently.
“Now where was I? Oh yes, the clock … Even to this day the grand mechanism has never moved on so much as another second. Did you know that? In the silence of the palace no one knew what to do. They looked down at this bundle of beautiful child and listened to the absence of time, that one ever-present in their lives until that very moment, and like the clock they froze.
“It was Iminez who suggested we take you up to the enchanter. I think perhaps even then she knew, or at least suspected. It was up in his draughty minaret that the raveller divined the truth that surrounded your life. More than a few suspected the old charlatan was spouting the usual lies—the old fool was one of the many deeply affected by the slaughter of Komark—because he didn’t want another death on his hands.”
“You say that as though he had been asked to put me in a sack and drown me like some annoying kitten, Suli.”
“And it was just so, believe me, Immaculada. The world you were born into was starkly different to the one you are leaving behind, my love. The clock may no longer tick but the thing it measures always moves on relentlessly, does it not? People were torn between wanting to remember and wanting to bury every reminder. More than anything you were a reminder. Especially when the raveller made his gambit. He took you in his bony old arms and cradled you close, your tiny lips inches from his ear. He nodded, kissed you once on the forehead and returned you to Iminez’s arms. The silence was almost reverent while people waited. When finally he spoke it was to say that you were our salvation. Eight thousand souls lived on through you and only through you might we, their murderers, find salvation, and eventually redemption.”
“And when you think of it now, when you see me lying here like this at the end of my story, do you see redemption?”
“I see the most beautiful woman who ever lived,” Suli said. “I see the one person who ever owned my heart, and of course because of that, I see my greatest regret.”
She looked at him. He had always thought she saw him like no one else ever did. She didn’t see the old man he had become, but neither did she see the young man he had been. She saw the myriad of people he might have become had he made different choices, the better men, the worse men. She saw all of him, all the ghosts of choices made and choices avoided. He had never hidden himself from her. That, more than anything, was what convinced him it was love not infatuation.
“Are you trying to make me cry again?”
Now it was his turn to smile. They had been together a long time, a lifetime, and he had never seen her cry.
She winced then, the slightest gasp escaping from her broken lips. She sank back into the bank of pillows beneath her head and seemed to die a little bit more before his eyes.
“Is it time?” he asked, needing to find something to say simply to make her answer him. He wasn’t ready for her to go yet. He look over at the leather-bound book on the nightstand. His last gift.
“Patience, my guardian angel,” she barely managed the words which meant it was.
It was difficult to imagine a world without her. She had always been the one. He would learn to live again, but with so few days of his own left it was hardly worth it. That was the worst part of watching her die; how it brought home his own strange mortality. Suli had lived more years than many. That was his curse, to live while those around him grew old and died. He hadn’t understood it when the woman had first offered him the cup. She had said “Drink, you will never be thirsty again,” and he had taken the simple clay cup in both hands, shaking with the effort of lifting it to his lips, and swallowed the water down gulp by gulp by desperate gulp.
That woman had been his first great love. The first, he was ashamed to say, of many. But hand on heart he could swear he had loved them all brilliantly, with all of his soul.
Her name, Sati, meant truth but he never heard a word of it from her lips. That was when he first learned the irony of names. Call a giant tiny, call a snake truth. Words could be taken and twisted to mean anything, be anything, and to conjure anything. They had power, there was no denying it. She taught him that. She taught him that the world was nothing more than words, God’s story being experienced by everyone all at once. Sati said it was God’s story because God’s was the only one worth telling. She spoke like that, as though she knew the Almighty. Maybe she did. He had no way of knowing. The woman called truth who lived in lies had taken Suli from his home, a simple hovel in the wilderness of the sands, and brought him to her palace where she had promised him eternity then gelded him. Suli the Eunuch, fated to live forever without the very thing that made eternity worthwhile. She said it was what would make his story unique. He would live out a life that, thanks to the water from the clay cup, would feel like eternity, surrounded by beauty he could never have.
It was all a great joke to the woman called truth. Sati had been the old Sultan’s raveller. She claimed once to have been God’s first wife. The audacity of the claim had made the old Sultan covet her all the more. Who wouldn’t want to lay with the woman who had taken God into her flesh?
It had been long before the clock had ticked its first tick. Long, in fact, before the wandering chronophage had stumbled into the Sultan’s palace clutching his drawings and raving in the delirium of fever that he had found God. Suli remembered the day. Some few from the thousands he had lived still stood out. That was one of them. He hadn’t really understood what the chronophage had meant by God. It wasn’t the deity who shaped the ground beneath their feet and put the dreams inside their heads while they slept. It couldn’t be. His God was one of numbers and formula, not divinity and martyrs. Still, the woman had been fascinated, and her fascination rubbed off on Suli. Even after all she had put him through he still wanted to please her. The need had weakened considerably but it wasn’t until the Great Mechanism was built he finally broke that curious need she had instilled in him. She called it love but he knew it wasn’t. How could it be? She took lovers in front of him using her voice, her moans and screams, to hurt him. Each little murmur was like a crucifixion nail being driven home into the soft parts of his flesh, each delicious moan like the meat being flayed from his bones.
But there came a point where the pain had to stop or overwhelm him completely, a point where his mind could take no more while still clinging on to his sense of self. All things have to end, that is the way of things. One had to give. In the end it turned out he loved himself more. That was a revelation to Suli. The chronophage’s ramblings had been fundamental in him winning himself back. He had claimed to have found God and it wasn’t her God. That made it a God Suli wanted to find. At first the chronophage refused to share his formula. It was for the Sultan only, for only one so close to the divine could dare to understand it. Of course the Sultan made the right noises, pretending that the marks on the paper made perfect sense to him and that in fact the chronophage had made the smallest miscalculation in his workings. He corrected this with a slight down-stroke of black ink and handed the crumpled paper back to the grateful chronophage who bowed and scraped obsequiously.
Suli could read, he was one of the few in the service of the Sultan who could.
He knew that the slash of black on the parchment was meaningless.
It was one of the first times he saw the vanity of the Sultan. The man could not admit weakness. Suli had no such problem. There was safety in weakness. They weak survived. All of the wisdom that claimed the fittest and strongest survived was a myth. The weak were ignored. They were never considered a threat. The strong were forever challenged to prove their strength, to fight and kill and die. That was the way of strength. Even the very strongest, those supposedly untouchable, spent every waking hour glancing over their shoulder for the knife they knew had to be coming. The weak were left to walk in peace. It was the first great irony Suli had learned. It had been lady liar who had taught him—though it had not been a lesson she had shared willingly. Far from it, it was the first thing he stole from her. There were others, but none so valuable. He watched the way she played different people. She had a different face for each encounter. A different way of saying yes, of demurring or deferring or denying. She was fascinating, and far, far stronger than the Sultan could ever have dreamed because of it. So while the Sultan lied and pretended to his court that he was some great God King, all seeing, all knowing, the woman took everything away from him. And how did she do that? She became his wife.
The Sultan had six hundred women he called wives, all charged with a single duty, to give him sons.
Such was the colossal vanity of the man, he would have a kingdom built in his own image.
At first Suli had struggled to see how the man could hope to keep six hundred women happy, but as he got to know them he realized it wasn’t about their happiness, it was about his image. These women had secret lovers, secret because should the Sultan ever discover he had been cuckolded not only would their lives be forfeit, their lovers would die as would everyone of their blood. It was a heavy punishment, but it only served to make them all the more careful not to get caught, it didn’t stop them from spreading their legs.
She was the only woman who refused to give him a child, and she cheated on him more than any other but somehow she did not get caught. The other wives whispered about her until she had their tongues cut out or had their eyes put out or their flesh burned until it was ugly and the Sultan couldn’t bear the sight of them never mind their touch. One by one the other wives fell away until there was only the snake. Suli had befriended many of them, his survival depended upon the kindness of others and with the Sultan being unpredictable at best, downright fickle at worst, friends in his court were a must. It was the game of politics. She was good at it. He pitied the wives because without realizing it they had become brood mares and stopped being women. They simply didn’t know how to deal with Suti the liar. He couldn’t help them though. He didn’t dare risk his own position. So he fell into the comfortable lie of weakness.