Imajica 02 - The Reconciliator

13

Clem's duties were done for the night. He'd been out since seven the previous evening, about the same business that took him out every night: the shepherding of those among the city's homeless too frail or too young to survive long on its streets with only concrete and cardboard for a bed. Midsummer Night was only two days away, and the hours of darkness were short and relatively balmy, but there were other stalkers besides the cold that preyed on the weak—all human—and the work of denying them their quarry took him through the empty hours after midnight and left him, as now, exhausted, but too full of feeling to lay down his head and sleep. He'd seen more human misery in the three months he'd been working with the homeless than in the four decades preceding that. People living in the extremes of deprivation within spitting distance of the city's most conspicuous symbols of justice, faith, and democracy: without money, without hope, and many (these the saddest) without much left of their sanity. When he returned home after these nightly treks, the hole left in him by Taylor's passing not filled but at least forgotten for a while, it was with expressions of such despair in his head that his own, met in the mirror, seemed almost blithe.

Tonight, however, he lingered in the dark city longer than usual. Once the sun was up he knew he'd have little or no chance of sleeping, but sleep was of little consequence to him at the moment. It was two days since he'd had the visitation that had sent him to Judy's doorstep with tales of angels, and since then there'd been no further hint of Taylor's presence. But there were other hints, not in the house but out here in the streets, that powers were abroad which his dear Taylor was just one sweet part of.

He'd had evidence of this only a short time ago. Just after midnight a man called Tolland, apparently much feared among the fragile communities that gathered to sleep under the bridges and in the stations of Westminster, had gone on a rampage in Soho. He'd wounded two alcoholics in a back street, their sole offense to be in his path when his temper flowed. Clem had witnessed none of this, but had arrived after Tolland's arrest to see if he could coax from the gutter some of those whose beds and belongings had been demolished. None would go with him, however, and in the course of his vain persuasions one of the number, a woman he'd never seen without tears on her face until now, had smiled at him and said he should stay out in the open with them tonight rather than hiding in his bed, because the Lord was coming, and it would be the people on the streets who saw Him first. Had it not been for Taylor's fleeting reappearance in his life, Clem would have dismissed the woman's blissful talk, but there were too many imponderables in the air for him to ignore the vaguest signpost to the miraculous. He'd asked the woman what Lord this was that was coming, and she'd replied, quite sensibly, that it didn't matter. Why should she care what Lord it was, she said, as long as He came?

Now it was an hour before dawn, and he was trudging across Waterloo Bridge because he'd heard the psychopathic Tolland had usually kept to the South Bank and something odd must have happened to drive him across the river. A faint clue, to be sure, but enough to keep Clem walking, though hearth and pillow lay in the opposite direction.

The concrete bunkers of the South Bank complex had been a favorite bete grise of Taylor's, their ugliness railed against whenever the subject of contemporary architecture came up in conversation. The darkness presently concealed their drab, stained facades, but it also turned the maze of underpasses and walkways around them into terrain no bourgeois would tread for fear of his life or his wallet. Recent experience had taught Clem to ignore such anxieties. Warrens such as this usually contained individuals more aggressed against than aggressive, souls whose shouts were defenses against imagined enemies and whose tirades, however terrifying they might seem emerging from shadow, usually dwindled into tears.

In fact, he'd not heard a whisper from the murk as he descended from the bridge. The cardboard city was visible where its suburbs spilled out into the meager lamplight, but the bulk of it lay under cover of the walkways, out of sight and utterly quiet. He began to suspect that the lunatic Tolland was not the only tenant who'd left his plot to travel north and, stooping to peer into the boxes on the outskirts, had that suspicion confirmed. He headed into shadow, fishing his pencil torch from his pocket to light the way. There was the usual detritus on the ground: spoiled scraps of food, broken bottles, vomit stains. But the boxes, and the beds of newspaper and filthy blankets they contained, were empty. More curious than ever, he wandered on through the rubbish, hoping to find a soul here too weak or too crazy to leave, who could explain this migration. But he passed through the city without finding a single occupant, emerging into what the planners of this concrete hell had designed as a children's playground. All that remained of their good intentions were the grimy bones of a slide and a jungle gym. The paving beyond them, however, was covered in fresh color, and advancing to the spot Clem found himself in the middle of a kitsch exhibition: crude chalk copies of movie-star portraits and glamour girls everywhere underfoot.

He ran the beam over the ground, following the trail of images. It led him to a wall, which was also decorated, but by a very different hand. Here was no mere copyist's work. This image was on such a grand scale Clem had to play his torch beam back and forth across it to grasp its splendor. A group of philanthropic muralists had apparently taken it upon themselves to enliven this underworld, and the result was a dream landscape, its sky green, with streaks of brilliant yellow, the plain beneath orange and red. Set on the sands, a walled city, with fantastical spires.

The torch beam caught a glint off the paint, and Clem approached the wall to discover that the muralists had only recently left off their labors. Patches of the paint were still tacky. Seen at close quarters, the rendering was extremely casual, almost slapdash. Barely more than half a dozen marks had been used to indicate the city and its towers, and only a single snaking stroke to show the highway running from the gates. Moving his beam off the picture to illuminate the way ahead, Clem realized why the muralists had been so haphazard. They had been at work on every available wall, creating a parade of brightly colored images, many of which were far stranger than the landscape with the green sky. To Clem's left was a man with two cupped hands for a head, lightning jumping between the palms; to his right a family of freaks, with fur on their faces. Farther on was an alpine scene, fantasticated by the addition of several naked women, hovering above the snows; beyond it a skull-strewn veldt, with a distant train belching smoke against a dazzling sky; and beyond that again, an island set in the middle of a sea disturbed by a single wave, in the foam of which a face could be discovered. AH were painted with the same passionate haste as the first, which fact lent them the urgency of sketches and added to their power. Perhaps it was his exhaustion, or simply the bizarre setting for this exhibition, but Clem found himself oddly moved by the images. There was nothing ingratiating or sentimental about them. They were glimpses into the minds of strangers, and he was exhilarated to find such wonders there.

With his gaze following the journey of pictures, he'd lost all sense of his own direction, but when he turned out his torch to look for the lamplight he saw a small fire burning up ahead, and in lieu of any other beacon he made his way towards it. The fire makers had occupied a small garden laid amid the concrete. It had perhaps once boasted a rose bed or flowering shrubs; benches, perhaps, dedicated to some dead city father. But now there was only a pitiful lawn, which barely greened the dirt it peered from. Gathered upon it were the tenants of the cardboard city, or some part of their number. Most were asleep, bundled up in their coats and blankets. But five or six were awake, standing around the fire and passing a cigarette between them as they talked.

A dreadlocked black squatted on the low wall beside the garden's gate and, spotting Clem, rose to guard the entrance. Clem didn't retreat. There was no threat visible in the man's posture, nor anything but calm in the garden beyond. The sleepers did so quietly, their dreams seemingly kind. And the debaters around the fire spoke in whispers. When they laughed, which they did now and then, it wasn't the hard, desperate noise he'd heard among these clans, but light.

"Who are you, man?" the black asked him.

"My name's Clem. I got lost."

"You don't look like you been sleepin' rough, man."

"I haven't."

"So why you here?"

"Like I said: I got lost."

The man shrugged. "Waterloo Station's over in that direction," he said, pointing roughly back the way Clem had come. "But you got a long wait for the first train." He caught Clem's glance into the garden. "Sorry, man, you can't come in. If you got a bed, go to it."

Clem didn't move, however. Something about one of the men at the fire, standing with his back to the gate, rooted him to the spot.

"Who is that, who's talking now?" he asked the guard.

The man glanced around. "That's the Gentile," he said.

"The Gentile?" he said. "Surely you mean Gentle."

He hadn't raised his voice in order to name the man, but the syllables must have carried on the tranquil air, because as they went from Clem's lips the speaker stopped talking and slowly turned towards the gate. With the fire burning at his back his features were hard to make out, but Clem knew he'd made no error. The man turned back to his fellow debaters and said something to them Clem didn't catch. Then he left their fire and walked down to the gate.

"Gentle?" his visitor said. "It's Clem."

The black stood aside, opening the gate to let the man he'd called the Gentile step out of the garden. There he stood and studied the stranger.

"Do I know you?" he said. There was no enmity in his voice, but there was no warmth either. "I do, don't I?"

"Yes, you do, my friend," Clem replied. "Yes, you do."

They walked together along the river, leaving the sleepers and the fire behind them. The many changes in Gentle soon became apparent. He was of course far from certain of who he was, but there were other changes which were, Clem sensed, profounder still. There was a plainness about his speech, and about the expression on his face, which was by turns disturbing and calming. Something of the Gentle he and Taylor had known had gone, perhaps forever. But something was on its way to being gained in its place, and Clem wanted to be there when it was: to be the angel guarding that tender self.

"Did you paint the pictures?" he asked.

"With my friend Monday," Gentle said. "We made them together."

"I never saw you paint anything like that before."

"They're places I've been," Gentle told him, "and people I've known. They start coming back to me when I've got the colors. But it's slow. There's so much filling my head"— he put his fingers to his brow, which bore a series of ill-healed lacerations—"confusing me. You call me Gentle, but I've got other names."

"John Zacharias?"

"That's one. Then there's a man in me called Joseph Bellamy, and another called Michael Morrison, and one called Almoth, and one called Fitzgerald, and one called Sartori. They all seem to be me, Clem. But that's not possible, is it? I asked Monday, and Carol, and Irish, and they said people have two names, sometimes three, but never ten."

"Maybe you've lived other lives, Gentle, and you're remembering them."

"If that's true, I don't want to remember. It hurts too much. I can't think straight. I want to be one man with one life. I want to know where I begin and where I end, instead of going on and on."

"Why's that so terrible?" Clem said, genuinely unable to see the horror in such expansion.

"Because I'm afraid there'll be no end to it," Gentle replied. He spoke steadily, like a metaphysician who'd reached a precipice and was calmly describing the abyss below for the benefit of those who couldn't—or wouldn't— be with him there. "I'm afraid I'm joined "to everything else," he said. "And then I'm going to be lost. I want to be this man, or that man, but not every man. If I'm everyone I'm no one, and nothing."

He stopped his even stride and turned to Clem, putting his hands on Clem's shoulders.

"Who am I?" he said. "Just tell me. If you love me, tell me. Who am I?" "You're my friend."

It wasn't an eloquent reply, but it was the only one Clem had. Gentle studied his companion's face for a minute or more, as if calculating the potency of this axiom against his dread. And slowly, as he scanned Clem's features, a smile plucked at the corners of his mouth, and tears began to glisten hi his eyes.

"You see me, don't you?" he said softly. "Of course I see you."

"I don't mean with your sight, I mean with your mind. I exist in your head."

"Gear as crystal," Clem said.

That was truer now than it had ever been. Gentle nodded, and his smile spread.

"Somebody else tried to teach me this," he said. "But I didn't understand." He paused, musing. Then he said, "It doesn't matter what I'm called. Names are nothing. I am what I am in you." His arms slipped around Clem, into an embrace. "I'm your friend."

He hugged Clem hard, then stood away, the tears clearing.

"Who was it who taught me that?" he wondered. "Judith, maybe?"

He shook his head. "I see her face over and over," he said. "But it wasn't her. It was somebody who went away." "Was it Taylor?" Clem said. "Do you remember Taylor?"

"He knew me too?" "He loved you."

"Where is he now?"

"That's a whole other story."

"Is it?" Gentle replied. "Or is it all one?"

They walked on along the river, exchanging questions and answers as they went. At Gentle's request Clem recounted Taylor's story, from life to deathbed, from deathbed to light, and Gentle in his turn offered what clues he had to the nature of the journey he'd returned from. Though he could remember very few of the details, he knew that unlike Taylor's it had not taken him into brightness. He'd lost many friends along the way—their names mingled with those of the lives he'd lived—and seen the deaths of many others. But he'd also witnessed the wonders he'd painted on the walls. Sunless skies that shimmered green and gold; a palace of mirrors, like Versailles; vast, mysterious deserts and ice cathedrals full of bells. Listening to these traveler's tales, the vistas of hitherto unknown worlds spreading in all directions, Clem felt his earlier ease with the notion of an unbounded self, going into some limitless adventure, falter. The very divisions he'd happily tried to persuade Gentle from at the outset of this report looked tempting now. But they were a trap, and he knew it. Their comfort would smother and hobble him eventually. He had to unburden himself of his old, stale ways of thinking if he was to travel alongside this man into places where dead souls were light and being was a function of thought.

"Why did you come back?" he asked Gentle after a time.

"I wish I knew," Gentle replied.

"We should find Judith. I think maybe she knows more about this than either of us."

"I don't want to leave these people, Clem. They took me in."

"I understand that," Clem said. "But Gentle, they can't help you now. They don't understand what's going on."

"Nor do we," Gentle reminded him. "But they listened when I told my story. They watched me paint, and they asked me questions, and when I told them the visions I'd had they didn't mock me." He stopped and pointed over the river towards the Houses of Parliament. "The lawgivers'll be coming there soon," he said. "Would you trust what I just told you to them? If we said to them that the dead come back in sunlight and there are worlds where the sky's green and gold, what would they say?" "They'd say we were crazy."

"Yes, And throw us into the gutter with Monday and Carol and Irish and all the rest."

"They're not in the gutter because they had visions, Gentle," Clem said. "They're there because they've been abused, or they've abused themselves."

"Which means they can't cover their despair the way the rest can. They've got no distractions from their pain. So they get drunk and crazy, and the next day they're even more lost than they were the day before. But I'd still rather trust them than all the bishops and the ministers. Maybe they're naked, but isn't that a holy state?"

"It's also a vulnerable one," Clem pointed out. "You can't drag them into this war."

"Who said there's going to be a war?" "Judith," Clem replied. "But even if she hadn't, it's in the air."

"Does she know who the enemy's going to be?" "No. But it'll be a hard battle, and if you care for these people you won't put them in the front line. They'll be there when the war's over."

Gentle pondered this for a time. Finally, he said, "So they'll be the peacemakers."

"Why not? They can spread the good news."

Gentle nodded. "I like that," he said. "And so will they."

"So shall we go and find Judith?"

"I think that'd be wise. But first, I have to say goodbye."

The day came with them as they retraced their steps along the bank, and by the time they reached the underpass the shadows were no longer black but gray-blue. Some of the beams had found their way through the concrete bridges and barricades and were edging towards the threshold of the garden.

"Where did you go?" Irish said, meeting his Gentile at the gate. "We thought you'd slipped away."

"I want you to meet a friend of mine," Gentle said. "This is Clem. Clem, this is Irish; this is Carol and Benedict. Where's Monday?"

"Asleep," said Benedict, the sometime guard.

"What's Clem short for?" Carol asked.

"Clement."

"I've seen you before," she said. "Didn't you used to bring round soup? You did, didn't you? I never forget faces."

Gentle led the way through the gate and into the garden. The fire was almost out, but there were enough embers to thaw chilled fingers. He squatted down beside the fire and poked at it with a stick to stir some flame, beckoning Clem to warm himself. But as Clem bent to do so he stopped.

"What is it?" Gentle said.

Clem's eyes went from the fire to the bundled forms still slumbering all around: twenty or more, still lost in dreams, though the light was creeping over them.

"Listen," he said.

One of the sleepers was laughing, so softly it was barely audible.

"Who is that?" Gentle said. The sound was contagious and brought a smile to his face.

"It's Taylor," Clem said.

"There's no one here called Taylor," Benedict said.

"Well, he's here," Clem replied.

Gentle stood up and scanned the sleepers. In the far corner of the garden Monday was lying flat on his back, with a blanket barely covering his paint-spattered clothes. A beam of morning light had found its straight, bright way between the concrete pillars and was settled on his chest, catching his chin and his pale lips. As if its gilding tickled, he laughed in his sleep.

"That's the boy who made the paintings with me," Gentle said.

"Monday," Clem remembered.

"That's right."

Clem picked his way through the dormitory to the youth's side. Gentle followed, but before he reached the sleeper the laughter faded. Monday's smile lingered, however, the sun catching the blond hairs on his upper lip. His eyes didn't open, but when he spoke it was as if he saw.

"Look at you, Gentle," he said. "The traveler returned. No, I'm impressed, really I am."

It wasn't quite Taylor's voice—the larynx shaping it was twenty years too young—but the cadences were his; so was the sly warmth.

"Clem told you I was hanging around, I presume."

"Of course," Clem said.

"Strange times, eh? I used to say I'd been born into the wrong age. But it looks as though I died into the right one. So much to gain. So much to lose."

"Where do I begin?" Gentle said.

"You're the Maestro, Gentle, not me."

"Maestro, am I?"

"He's still remembering, Tay," Clem explained.

"Well, he should be quick about it," Taylor said. "You've had your holiday, Gentle. Now you've got some healing to do. There's a hell of a void waiting to take us all if you fuck up. And if it comes"—the smile went from Monday's face—"if it comes there won't be any more spirits in the light, because there won't be any light. Where's your familiar, by the way?"

"Who?"

"The mystif."

Gentle's breath quickened.

"You lost it once, and I went looking for it. I found it too, mourning its children. Don't you remember?" ' "Who was this?" Clem asked.

"You never met it," Taylor said. "If you had, you'd remember."

"I don't think Gentle does," Clem said, looking at the Maestro's troubled face.

"Oh, the mystifs in there somewhere," Taylor said. "Once seen, never forgotten. Go on, Gentle. Name it for me. It's on the tip of your tongue."

Gentle's expression became pained.

"It's the love of your life, Gentle," Taylor said, coaxing Gentle on. "Name it. I dare you. Name it."

Gentle frowned and mouthed silence. But finally his throat gave up its hostage. "Pie ..." he murmured.

Taylor smiled through Monday's face. "Yes... ?"

"Pie 'oh' pah."

"What did I tell you? Once seen, never forgotten."

Gentle said the name again and again, breathing it as though the syllables were an incantation. Then he turned to Clem.

"That lesson I never learned," he said. "It came from Pie."

"Where's the mystif now?" Taylor asked. "Do you have any idea?"

Gentle went down on his haunches beside Tay's sleeping host. "Gone," he said, closing his hands around the sunlight.

"Don't do that," Taylor said softly. "You only catch the dark that way." Gentle opened his hand again and let the light lie on his palm. "You say the mystifs gone?" Tay went on. "Where, for God's sake? How can you lose it twice?"

"It went into the First Dominion," Gentle replied. "It died and went where I couldn't follow."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"But I'll see it again, when I've done my work," Gentle said.

"Finally, we get to it," Tay said.

"I'm the Reconciler," Gentle said. "I've come to open the Dominions ..."

"So you have, Maestro," Tay said.

"... on Midsummer Night."

"You're cutting it fine," Clem said. "That's tomorrow."

"It can be done," Gentle said, standing up again. "I know who I am now. He can't hurt me any more."

"Who can't?" Clem asked.

"My enemy," Gentle replied, turning his face into the sunlight. "Myself."

After only a few days in this city that enemy, the sometime Autarch Sartori, had begun yearning for the languid dawns and elegaic dusks of the Dominion he'd left. The day came altogether too quickly here and was snuffed out with, the same alacrity. That would have to change. Among his plans for the New Yzordderrex would be a palace made of mirrors, and of glass made possessive by feits, that would hold the glory of these inkling dawns and protract them, so that they met the glow of dusk coming in other directions. Then he might be happy here.

There would be, he knew, little in the way of resistance to his taking of the Fifth, to judge by the ease with which the members of the Tabula Rasa had succumbed to him. All but one of them was now dead, cornered in their burrows like rabid vermin. Not one had detained him more than minutes; they had given up their lives quickly, with few sobs and still fewer prayers. He wasn't surprised. Their ancestors had been strong-willed men, but even the most pungent blood thinned over generations, and the children of their children of their children (and so on) were faithless cowards.

The only surprise he'd had in this Dominion, and it was a sweet one, was the woman whose bed he was returning to: the peerless and eternal Judith. His first taste of her had been in Quaisoir's chambers when, mistaking her for the woman he'd married, he'd made love to her on the bed of veils. Only later, as he'd prepared to quit Yzordderrex, had Rosengarten informed him of Quaisoir's maiming and gone on to report the presence of a doppelgSnger in the corridors of the palace. That report had been Rosengarten's last as a loyal commander. When, a few minutes later, he'd been ordered to join his Autarch on the journey to the Fifth, he'd unconditionally refused. The Second was his home, he said, and Yzordderrex his pride, and if he was to die then he wanted it to be in sight of the comet. Tempted as he was to punish the man for this dereliction of duty, Sartori had no desire to enter his new world with blood on his hands. He'd let the man go and departed for the Fifth, believing the woman he'd made love to on Quaisoir's bed was somewhere in the city behind him. But no sooner had he taken up the mask of his brother's life than he'd met her again, in Klein's garden of scentless flowers.

He never ignored omens, good or bad. Judith's reappearance in his life was a sign that they belonged together, and it seemed that she, all unknowing, felt the same. Here was the woman for the love of whom this whole sorry catalogue of death and desolation had been started, and in her company he felt himself renewed, as though the sight of her reminded his cells of the self he'd been before his fall. He was being offered a second chance: an opportunity to start again with the creature he'd loved and make an empire that would erase all memory of his previous failure. He'd had proof of their compatibility when they'd made love. A more perfect welding of erotic impulses he could scarcely have imagined. After it, he'd gone out into the city about the business of murder with more vigor than ever.

It would take time, of course, to persuade her that this was a marriage decreed by fate. She believed him to be his other and would be vengeful when he disabused her of this fiction. But he would bring her around in time. He had to. He had intimations, even in this blithe city, of intolerable things: whispers of oblivion that made the foulest Oviate he'd ever dredged up look alluring. She could save him from that, lick off his sweats and rock him to sleep. He had no fear that she'd reject him. He had a claim on her that would make her put aside all moral niceties: his child, planted in her two nights before.

It was his first. Though he and Quaisoir had attempted to found a dynasty many times, she'd repeatedly miscarried, then later corrupted her body with so much kreauchee it refused to produce another egg. But this Judith was a wonder. Not only had she made surpassing love with him, there was fruit from that coupling. And when the time came to tell her (once the irksome Oscar Godolphin was dead, and the line for whom she'd been made stopped), then she would see the perfection of their union and feel it, kicking in her womb.

Jude hadn't slept, waiting for Gentle to return from another night of wanderings. The summons she carried from Celes-tine was too heavy to sleep with; she wanted it said and done, so she could put her thoughts of the woman away. Nor did she want to be unconscious when he returned. The idea of his coming in and watching her sleep, which would have been comforting two nights before, unsettled her now. He was the egg licker, and its thief. When she had her possession back and he was gone off to Highgate, she'd rest, but not before.

The day was creeping up when he finally returned, but there was insufficient light for her to read much on his face until he was within a few yards of her, by which time he was wreathed in smiles. He chastised her fondly for waiting up. There was no need, he said; he was quite safe. The pleasantries stopped here, however. He saw her unease and wanted to know what was wrong.

"I went to Roxborough's tower," she told him.

"Not on your own, I hope. Those people can't be trusted."

"I took Oscar."

"And how's Oscar?"

She was in no mood to prettify. "He's dead," she said.

He looked genuinely saddened at this. "How did that happen?" he asked.

"It doesn't matter."

"It does to me," he insisted. "Please. I want to know."

"Dowd was there. He killed Godolphin."

"Did he hurt you?"

"No. He tried. But no."

"You shouldn't have gone up there without me. What on earth possessed you?"

She told him, as plainly as she knew: "Roxborough had a prisoner," she said. "A woman he buried under the tower."

"He kept that little kink to himself," came the reply. She thought there was something almost admiring in his tone, but she fought the temptation to accuse him. "So you went to dig up her bones, did you?"

"I went to release her."

Now she had every scrap of his attention. "I don't follow," he said.

"She's not dead."

"So she's not human." He made a curt little smile. "What was Roxborough doing up there? Raising wantons?"

"I don't know what wantons are."

"They're ethereal whores."

"That doesn't describe Celestine." She trailed the bait of the name, but he failed to bite. "She's human. Or at least she was."

"And what is she now?"

Jude shrugged. "Something ... else. I don't quite know what. She's powerful, though. She almost killed Dowd."

"Why?"

"I think you're better off hearing that from her."

"Why should I want to?" he said lightly.

"She asked to see you. She says she knows you."

"Really? Did she say from where?"

"No. But she told me to mention Nisi Nirvana."

He chuckled at this.

"Does it mean something to you?" Jude said.

"Yes, of course. It's a story for children. Don't you know it?"

"No."

Even as she spoke, she realized why, but it was he who voiced the reason. ,

"Of course you don't," he said. "You were never a child, were you?"

She studied his face, wishing she could be certain he meant to be cruel.

"So will you go to her?"

"Why should I? I don't know her."

"But she knows you."

"What is this?" he said. "Are you trying to palm me off on another woman?"

He took a step towards her, and though she tried to conceal her reluctance to be touched, she failed.

"Judith," he said. "I swear I don't know this Celestine. It's you I think about when I'm not here—"

"I don't want to discuss that now."

"What do you suspect me of?" he said. "I've done nothing. I swear." He laid both his hands on his chest. "You're hurting me, Judith. I don't know if that's what you want to do, but you are. You're hurting me."

"That's a new experience for you, is it?"

"Is that what this is about? A sentimental education? If it is, I beg you, don't torment me now. We've got too many enemies to be fighting with each other."

"I'm not fighting. I don't want to fight."

"Good," he said, opening his arms. "So come here."

She didn't move.

"Judith."

"I want you to go and see Celestine. I promised her I'd find you, and you'll make a liar of me if you don't go."

"All right, I'll go," he said. "But I'm going to come back, love, you can depend on that. Whoever she is, whatever she looks like, it's you I want." He paused. "Now more than ever," he said.

She knew he wanted her to ask him why, and for fully ten seconds she kept her silence rather than satisfy him. But the look on his face was so brimming she couldn't keep her curiosity from putting the question on her tongue.

"Why now?" she said.

"I wasn't going to tell you yet..."

"Tell me what?"

"We're going to have a child, Judith."

She stared at him, waiting for some further explanation: that he'd found an orphan on the street or was bringing a babe from the Dominions. But that wasn't what he meant at all, and her pounding heart knew it. He meant a child born from the act they'd performed: a consequence.

"It'll be my first," he said. "Yours too, yes?"

She wanted to call him liar. How could he know when she didn't? But he was quite certain of his facts.

"He'll be a prophet," he said. "You'll see."

She already had, she realized. She'd entered its tiny life when the egg had plunged her consciousness down into her own body. She'd seen with its stirring spirit: a jungle city, and living waters; Gentle, wounded, and coming to take the egg from tiny fingers. Had that perhaps been the first of its prophecies?

"We made a kind of love no other beings in this Dominion could make," Gentle was saying. "The child came from that."

"You knew what you were doing?"

"I had my hopes."

"And didn't I get a choice in the matter? I'm just a womb, am I?"

"That's not how it was."

"A walking womb!"

"You're making it grotesque."

"It is grotesque."

"What are you saying? How can anything that comes from us be less than perfection?" He spoke with almost religious zeal. — Tm changing, sweet. I'm discovering what it is to love, and cherish, and plan for the future. See how you're changing me?"

"From what? From the great lover to the great father? Another day, another Gentle?"

He looked as though he had an answer on his tongue but bit it back. "We know what we mean to each other," he said. "There should be proof of that. Judith, please—" His arms were still open, but she refused to go into them. "When I came here I said I'd make mistakes, and I asked you to forgive me if I did. I'm asking you again now."

She bowed her head and shook it. "Go away," she said.

"I'll see this woman if you want me to. But before I go, I want you to swear something to me. I want you to swear you won't try and harm what's in you."

"Go to hell."

"It's not for me. It's not even for the child. It's for you. If you were to do any harm to yourself because of something I did, my life wouldn't be worth living."

"I'm not going to slit my wrists, if that's what you think."

"It's not that."

"What then?"

"If you try to abort the child, it won't go passively. It's got our purpose in it; it's got our strength. It'll fight for its life, and it may take yours in the process. Do you understand what I'm saying?" She shuddered. "Speak to me."

"I've got nothing to say to you that you want to hear. Go talk to Celestine."

"Why don't you come with me?"

"Just... go ... away."

She looked up. The sun had found the wall behind him and was celebrating there. But he remained in shadow. For all his grand purpose, he was still made to be fugitive: a liar and a fraud.

"I want to come back," he said.

She didn't answer.

"If you're not here, I'll know what you want from me."

Without a further word he went to the door and let himself out. Only as she heard the front door slam did she shake herself from her stupor and realize he'd taken the egg with him as he went. But then like all mirror lovers he was fond of symmetry, and it probably pleased him to have that piece of her in his pocket, knowing she had a piece of him hi a deeper place still.