Lucia's Masks Page 27

  When she had finally gone back seeking a rapprochement, the Armoury had mocked her with its emptiness. Perhaps she would never know who had stormed The New Amazons’ stronghold, and whether her mother and her band of warriors were alive or dead. This ignorance of her mother’s fate was also a curse.

  In the self-reviling days of her convalescence, Bird Girl was haunted by images of her mother strung up like an animal in an abattoir. Her own unforgivable words would invade her, like sharpened hooks that tore at her breast wound. Her grieving then for Lola would send her nearly deranged. Lola had sacrificed herself, not realizing how despicable, degraded, and worthless Bird Girl actually was.

  If it hadn’t been for Chandelier, Bird Girl wonders if she might have tried to do away with herself. How could she ever have thought him a bit dense, albeit gentle-natured? She is still astounded by the treasure trove of knowledge he brought to comfort and distract her during the worst of her clawing grief and self-hatred. It was a marvel really, just how much Chandelier had packed into his small head. He was one of those rare people who could simply scan a page and have its entire content memorized. He knows rather more about reptiles than she’s interested in hearing. But he has stored away as well, the plots of countless myths and dramas and novels — and glory of glories — some poetry.

  During her recovery, the two of them evolved a game of tossing one another poetic words or snippets to see what ideas or odd filaments of thought they might attract. “Darkling” was one of those words. Bird Girl had learned it from the Fool in King Lear: So, out went the candle, and we were left darkling. She had concentrated on every word the Fool spoke in that play. She loved the way he stood back and commented with such barbed wit and compassion on the old king’s disintegration, and on human greed, folly, and betrayal. Bird Girl always imagined the Fool as small and young and fluidly acrobatic. She also thought of him as brave and blithe. He gave people the bitter draught of truth to drink down, but made it palatable with humour. She often wished that Lear’s Fool, or someone like him, could be one of their company. So she was pleased to discover something of his mercurial spirit in Chandelier as she came to know him better.

  When she spoke her word “darkling,” Chandelier tossed it back to her in triplicate. He knew a poem called “The Darkling Thrush,” about a frail and aged bird who chose to “fling his soul upon the growing gloom” of a killing winter.

  He knew “Darkling, I listen,” from “Ode to a Nightingale.” The young poet who wrote this praise-song to the bird was dying of a wasting lung disease, Chandelier told her. That was why he spoke of being “half in love with easeful Death.” When the poet hears the nightingale pouring forth its soul in ecstasy, he recognizes there could be no more perfect moment for him to die. “Darkling, I listen.” Bird Girl thought the poet used the word to enfold himself: like a protective cloak against the dank night air.

  The third “darkling” Chandelier tossed her was grim and chill, like dirty water flung in one’s face. She recognized their own situation right away in the lines he recited. This was their time, as they were now, even though Chandelier told her the poem had been written hundreds of years ago:

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  It is all still the same, Bird Girl thinks: the struggle and flight, and the clash of ignorant armies. The only difference is the EYE, which watched everything from its grand remove, and orchestrated more than any of us could ever know. Although she detested the endless, dismal forest, at least it freed them from the EYE’s eternal surveillance and control.

  A picture comes to her of the six of them: she and Chandelier and Harry, Lucia, Candace, and the Outpacer in flight from the City, labouring to cross the poet’s darkling plain. They look far, far away, recognizable only by their respective shapes silhouetted against a pale green sky. These little shadow-figures struggling onward look so minuscule from that distant perspective and so obviously weary that the understanding comes to her. They are “the darklings.”

  She thinks then, as she often does, of the smooth glazed features of the masks from the theatre box. She is puzzled still by their huge, protruding foreheads that look oddly wrong and sore — and yet right somehow — for their stern and oracular faces. She wonders what obscure function or secret lies behind their wide-open mouths and the bulges above their eyes, and whether it might help the darklings in their journey.

  She was studying her own mask, searching its coldly enigmatic gaze, when the Outpacer rushed in with his news about the camp of silk tents. He’d done a quick reconnoitre, he told them breathlessly, and seen women in long skirts, children, and a tethered goat. “A goat,” he repeated excitedly. “Do you see the significance? If they keep a goat, they’re probably peaceable.”

  Candace, Harry, and Chandelier all looked at him stunned. It took Bird Girl a moment to realize this was because the Outpacer has let down his cowl. He had at last exposed his face to all of them. She did not immediately notice because since his hood fell away in Lola’s bedroom she has continued to visualize his face even through the shadowy burlap.

  “I am sorry,” he told them, “to show myself to you so abruptly. But how else was it to be done?”

  Even Candace, whose mouth still hung open, seemed to recognize this as a rhetorical question. Harry nodded and cleared his throat, a sound gruff enough to jar them all out of their stupor and into action. Bird Girl’s skin was buzzing, as was her head. She presumed the others felt what she was feeling: curiosity shot through with apprehension; hopefulness tinged with foreboding. What if the encampment was not what it appeared? What if they were walking into an ambush?

  But oh, how those storybook elements pulled at her. She desperately wanted to see for herself the silk tents, the children, the women in their long skirts, and the tethered goat. She had never seen a real goat, but she remembered reading somewhere that this animal was known as the Mother of Destiny. She could not recall why, or what civilization came up with this idea. Was she the only one of the six harbouring the notion that their destiny would change once they met these people in their colourful camp?

  Everyone, even Harry, appeared uncommonly edgy. She guessed that the Outpacer’s sudden emergence from his cowl had augmented the general tension. It wasn’t just the surprise of seeing a human face with the requisite eyes, nose, mouth, chin, and cheekbones, where for months one had seen only a folded hood. The Outpacer had the kind of features, and particularly the kind of eyes, that never failed to hit you like a lightning bolt. Was this because he looked so much like a wolf? Magnetically predatory. As if he could strip you naked and sink his teeth into your haunches, and you would say “thank you very much” and worship him and let him do with you as he would. Here he was — gaunt, grimy, and looking more than a bit haggard. Yet he was still unmistakably resplendent. Their protector, whose naked face they were all immensely grateful to see at last.

  When the Outpacer asked Candace to go with him as emissary to treat with the people of the silk tents, she blushed right down to the top of her décolletage. Candace happened to have on one of her lower-cut tops this morning, and Bird Girl noticed how remarkably pretty and vulnerable the pink flush made her look.

  Candace recovered from her embarrassment quickly enough, declaring rather pompously that she should carry a white flag. Bird Girl was sure she saw the Outpacer’s lips twitch. “By all means,” he said, at which Candace began looking for a stick stout enough to bear the length of dazzling white fabric she has taken from her pack.

  Bird Girl was bewildered as to why Candace has been carrying a large linen table cloth, through all their travails. What on earth can she have had in mind, bringing something so completely impractical? The cloth did, however, make a very impressive white flag which Candace waved about with some panache.

  As the two returned from the parley, they could hear Candace exclaiming: “Heart-warming; a brilliant s
uccess!” She was definitely swaggering. She boomed out that the People of the Silk were offering them hospitality for a day or two. Bird Girl tried not to dwell on how smug Candace looked.

  They then all set off together to meet the People of the Silk.

  When they finally emerge clear of the last of the prickly brush Bird Girl takes her deepest breath for months, revelling in the sight of the lifting hills on the unbounded horizon. She feels absurdly light and dainty and joyous. As they come closer, so dazzled is she by the vision of the sun-stained, silken tents that she does not immediately register Chandelier’s shout of joy. Perhaps it is because the sound he makes seems so much a part of everything she beholds.

  She sees an older woman coming toward them — a tall, statuesque woman with red-gold hair arranged in a braided circlet round her brow. She wears a full-length gown of sapphire blue that flows in rhythm with her slow and stately walk.

  “Miriam!” Chandelier exclaims. When has he ever sounded so happy? She understands this must be the healing woman Chandelier told her about, the one who cared for him after the Egg exploded, and who gave him the earring from which he took his name.

  A giant of a man thunders into view. He is dressed in a stained leather overall, and his massive arms are bare. His head is huge, as are his hands. His mouth is wide open and he is roaring. It is the Maker, Bird Girl realizes, and the fear that grips her is a claw round her throat. Chandelier told her the Maker hated him so much, the man had carved a threat-mark on his spine. And so her breath catches to see the hard fury in the giant’s eye. But the most terrifying thing is the lance he bears, its steely tip aimed at Chandelier’s heart.

  What happens next is so extraordinary Bird Girl cannot at first absorb what she is seeing. Candace, who had been standing a little to her left, transforms herself into a missile. Bird Girl watches unbelieving as Candace hurls herself at the giant, tackles him on his left side, and brings him down.

  The giant roars again as the lance falls from his hand. They all run to where Candace and the giant grapple on the ground; then watch amazed as the huge man gets up and with an exaggerated chivalry helps Candace to her feet.

  Their eyes lock. They stand motionless, Candace staring up at him, and the giant looking down at her. Candace’s face glows as ripely as her heaving breast. She speaks not a word. That is how Bird Girl knows for certain that Eros has undone her.

  Bird Girl inwardly wishes Candace joy of this glowering hulk of a man with his shaggy hair and rank odour she can smell even at this distance. Nevertheless, she feels a rancorous pain in her chest. It takes her a moment to identify this malignant sensation as envy.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Candace Is Vanquished

  SHE WAS STUNNED WHEN SHE SAW the huge, unkempt man bearing down on Chandelier with his lance. For a split-second she pictured the boy’s unspeakable death, his slight body impaled on this crude weapon and his life’s blood seeping out. She was not conscious of thinking after that. The next thing she knew she was flying at the giant, her sole goal to bring him down before he can strike.

  It is the hot animal stink of him that casts the first spell. As she hurls herself against the wild man throwing him off balance, Candace is both magnetized and repulsed by his ripe stench. Unconsciously she catalogues the ingredients of his pungent odour, identifying long-ingrained dirt, sweat of a peculiar fruitiness, and the shrill tang of dried blood and hot metal. This sharp scent of iron or perhaps something deeper in him still — in the lining of his gut or the marrow of his bones — draws her to him inexorably so that she knows herself immediately to be the nail to his hammer, the molten substance on his forge. She senses, even at this distance, how his fierce heat would dissolve all trace of a woman’s lingering sin and restore her innocence.

  Long afterwards, when she has borne him one child, and then another and another, Candace would continue to relive with blushing pleasure her first visceral response to the Maker. “My Vulcan,” she calls him; “my man,” words she utters with a tender pride and absolute fealty.

  In the instant he helps her to her feet, she sees in his eyes a rampant desire that matches her own. The transformation comes about with a startling swiftness: the hosts of butterflies in her belly are now aflutter everywhere, craving sweetness that only this man can give her. Until this moment, Candace had no idea what passion was. She is overwhelmed by the agonizing rush of joy and suffering that impels her toward Vulcan; the compulsion to know and lick every crease and pore in his flesh and to dread his absence above everything else in the world. She is left reeling by the sheer intensity of desire: how hot it is and how sharp, as if his lance has indeed pierced her through. Her knees buckle. In her mind’s eye she sees her idealized community dissolve, and this mammoth, uncouth, magnificent man stands in its place, his legs wide-planted on the earth.

  The Maker takes her hand and guides her to a private enclosure he regards as his own. Candace, dizzied by her pounding heart, is aware only of a dappled greenness, a yielding softness underfoot and a rustling of leaves that verges on music. Later she will see that the whispering leaves belong to poplars and that the soft floor on which the Maker strips her bare is moss. She is overwhelmed by the fluid delicacy with which he removes her clothes and the gentle touch of his fingers and lips. Somehow she understands that he is deliberately holding back; that he is making the revelation of her nakedness a sacred act. His every gesture has a gravity that betokens respect; even, she thinks, worship.

  Once she is naked, he walks around her, marking out a perfect circle. “How beautiful you are,” he whispers. His words conjure up a mystical veil round them, as he looks with such evident wonder at her heavy breasts, her wide hips, her Rubenesque buttocks. He bends to caress her rosy knees, and her small feet with their rosy nails. She is spellbound when he flings himself on his knees and presses his face to the dark-blond curls of her bush, his tongue warm and a little rough. She gasps and moans as he explores the shape and thickness of her labia and how he might best bring her pleasure.

  He lifts her up, although it seems to her that she has flown up to his shoulders where she sits, her legs splayed, her vagina spread open to his mouth. His massive hands brace her back as she yields to an undertow of sensation so rapturous she wonders if she has departed the earth altogether. There is an instant in which she pictures what a shameless spectacle they would make for an onlooker: a naked woman hoisted on the shoulders of a giant, her thighs pressed tight against his face, his tongue pushing deep inside her, his right hand stroking her buttocks and tickling her cleft.

  Picturing herself thus — spread open, greedy for the pleasure Vulcan lavishes upon her, Candace triggers her own climax. The idea comes to her that her lover has somehow conspired to shower her with gold. Then she is lost to herself. The old Candace is no more. She is reborn and emerges from her metamorphosis only half aware of the wild cries she uttered during her transformation.

  Candace never knew that her cries of ecstasy rang out clearly in the camp of the People of the Silk. Nor would anyone ever tell her it was Harry who coughed loudly and long in a vain attempt to protect her privacy.

  The couple’s consummation is accomplished hastily, then lingeringly, upon their bed of moss. Afterwards, they wash each other in a stream that runs cool and clear between banks of bulrushes. Candace touches Vulcan’s chest, spreading her fingers wide in the black wiry hair, delighted at how tiny her hand appears against his thatch. She strokes his face adoringly and the thick rod of his penis springs toward her again.

  “Wife,” he says to her, while they are still immersed in the water.

  “Husband,” she answers him.

  When at last he leaves her, because he is the Maker and must attend to the day’s chores, Candace sits on a while alone. Despite bathing, she can still smell him on her skin. She is bewildered by the immensity of her joy, and yet how light and liquid a thing it is. She understands she is home at last, in a place of profoundest sheltering and fruitfulness.

  A so
ng rises up within her, an aria she had forgotten she knew. Indeed, she has to heart only its melody and phonetic sounds, for the aria is in Italian and Candace does not understand the meaning of the words she sings. Unlike her speaking voice, which tends to be nasal, her singing voice is an unalloyed and unaffected soprano. At the camp, her travelling companions hear this angelic sound and shake their heads disbelievingly.

  “Can it be?” The Outpacer speaks aloud the question every mind forms.

  “Who would have thought it?” Harry asks twice.

  When Candace finishes the aria, she sings it once again. Both Lucia and Harry, who understands Italian, ponder the strange words.

  For Chandelier, the song stirs memories that he would prefer left quiescent. This aria had been a great favourite of his father’s, and its miraculous form had often taken wing beneath the roof of the Egg.

  The boy, whose heart is already sore at seeing Miriam, flinches as the music floods his mind with pictures he finds unbearable. He tries fruitlessly to push them away; throws himself to the ground and sobs bitterly. Harry, who sees Chandelier’s plight from some distance, tries to go to the boy. But it is one of those cursed times when his legs refuse to obey his will. The old man strikes at his faltering limbs in frustration, and cries out to Bird Girl who is already running toward the prostrate boy.

  To all this Candace remains oblivious, wrapped in the globe of her own happiness. She has already moved on.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chandelier Sees Snake’s Tongue

  Ombra mai fù di vegetabile

  Cara ed amabile soave più

  THE BOY GRINDS HIS FACE IN the dirt. He cannot stop himself, so heavy and unendurable is his pain. This music recalls joyous moments he has urged himself repeatedly to forget: those most rare times of family contentment when he felt himself nourished, like a normal boy with normal parents, all three bound by love.