Lucia's Masks Read online

  She lanced boils, plucked out thorns and slivers and leeches, made herbal potions to ease aching bellies, heads and backs. The first time she attended a birth, her hands shook. The sweat of fear was a runnel between her breasts. The baby was perfect. Miriam wept.

  She wept again when she bathed the wounds of the adolescent boy who had stumbled into their camp, because he was so perfect; his slight ivory body, tender and trusting. His face (as though his mother had dreamed him) was one that often appears in the frescoes of Italy. He had a Renaissance face. Miriam was shaken by his beauty, which she discerned even through the wounds he had inflicted on himself. She locked her strong legs about his body to help stop his trembling. And so it came about, as she rocked him with her body and hummed softly in his ear, that his sex rose and hardened. Miriam lifted her skirt and took him inside her. The orgasm, she thought, would help him sleep. And besides, she desired him.

  In this way, the boy found a mother and a lover simultaneously.

  This situation could not last. Theirs was a relationship too purely archetypal and too fraught with pitfalls to last. One of those pitfalls came in the form of Vulcan, the giant. The People of the Silk called him their Maker, because this massive man fashioned their tent pegs and frames. He was equally adept working with wood or what little metal they had. He mended pots and carts and the palanquin on which they transported the ancient Seamstress when they moved camp.

  Miriam had once taken the Maker to her bed — initially out of desire, and later out of pity. But she reached a point where she could no longer tolerate his idea of lovemaking: his body the hammer and hers the anvil. Although she had encouraged him, he seemed incapable of learning other ways. After a time she came to loathe his smell of metal and sour sweat. She put him off gently. She hoped his common sense would prevail. Strong passions, she cautioned him, other than reverence for the silk and the Seamstress, would tear apart the tissue of the group’s bonding.

  There was a resolute discipline amongst the Silk People, its rule not so much defined as absorbed from the Seamstress’s example. Her slight form, spare and functional as one of her own treasured needles, radiated purpose. Her age was a mystery, as were her origins. The fact she grappled daily with excruciating pain was not. Every one of the Silk People recognized and reverenced the ferocious determination the Seamstress brought to boring a channel through her agony. There were times it hurt them to look at her hands, clenched against her breastbone like claws. They watched amazed and relieved as she applied the fire of her will to her disobedient nerves so that she could carry on, mending any tears in the tents’ delicate fabric. Her fingers unknotted, flexed, then fluttered, became birds in the air. This was no legerdemain. The Silk People saw the Seamstress’s breath catch and her cheek pale. They knew the wrench of self-discipline this miracle cost her.

  The Seamstress was their icon, and even the Maker was awed by her powers. For her sake and for the sake of the group, he wrestled with his rampant lust for Miriam. But because the gangly boy Miriam had taken to her tent was not properly one of the People of the Silk, the Maker did not put up the least fight against his jealousy of this pale, mute adolescent. His hatred of the boy was absolute, as dense as the point of the blade he pressed one night to the base of the young interloper’s spine. The Maker drew the knife over each of the boy’s knobby vertebrae, leaving behind the barest crimson thread that culminated in an upward flick under his left ear lobe. It was the same ear lobe that Miriam had punctured at the boy’s request so that she could insert one of her own cut-glass earrings.

  This earring had come loose and fallen between her breasts on the third night she and the boy slept together. He had plucked it up and mimed his wish. Miriam whispered her promise and in the morning pierced the soft flesh of his lobe with a sterilized needle. The hole healed speedily, which delighted her. Within days, she was able to insert the hooked wire from which hung the lozenge-shaped prism. The boy tilted his chin, moved his head in a graceful arc, held his hand up to his face so that the refracted sunlight made a rainbow in his palm.

  “Chandelier,” he said, and in that instant gave himself a new name, one bound in some way to this lovely woman. “My name,” he told her.

  These were the first words he had spoken to Miriam. Her soul was pierced then. It was the sound of his voice did it, a timbre that had only just crossed into manhood. Miriam appreciated the primacy of voice in love. Idiosyncratic as fingerprints, with its origins deep in the body cavities, voice was, she believed, the soul of the person bodied forth. She had learned that you could not always trust the eyes.

  But even as the sound of his voice pierced her being, even as she registered how absolutely she was smitten, Miriam saw the relationship must be severed. It was as if she watched herself and the boy on one of the disgusting sky-screens that had multiplied above the City streets. The hugely magnified images of the rich at their indecent play had hung heavy on her back, although she shielded her eyes from them.

  Now her conscience forced her to confront in her mind’s eye the projected images of Miriam and Chandelier. She saw the ludicrous disparity in their ages, her already crinkled skin against his translucent gleam. Above all she saw and smelled his untried nature. She guessed he had been shut away, cloistered somehow. That was why he flinched each morning when he left her tent, and was exposed to the sky. Chandelier-and Miriam. Miriam-and-Chandelier. On the sky-screen in her mind, they played at being mother and son, mother and lover, lover and lover. The truth of the matter was inescapable — and for Miriam — unbearable. Yet she realized she had no choice. Her love, profound and complex as it was, would cripple him. His wings would go untried.

  So even before the Maker toppled Chandelier to the ground and scored the flesh over his spine, Miriam had been planning for the boy’s departure. She had given him an amulet to wear around his neck: a tiny pouch stitched by the Seamstress herself, containing a lock of Miriam’s hair and a drop of her blood dried on a square of silk. “Apotropaic,” she said, as she slipped the stringed pouch over his head. He mouthed the word back at her silently and nodded. As if, she thought, he knew what it meant. Which in fact he did.Her earnest, silent wish had the force of a blessing. She willed the contents of the pouch to deflect the evil eye. Evil eyes rather, because wickedness walked these days in many forms. She prayed the boy would be wary.

  She gave him as well, little packets of nuts and dried fruit, a light-weight plastic bowl to serve as a hat, and the compass she had used to guide her on her flight from the City. “Go only this way,” she said, pointing to the north. “Promise me,” she urged.

  “Yes,” he answered, although he was saddened and confused still as to why she was sending him away.

  “Never to the South,” she insisted, pointing again. “South is where the City lies and it is full of dangers. In the North you will find others like us.”

  He nodded, yet sensed an uncertainty in her, as if some full force of will was lacking in her words.

  There was no mistaking the Maker’s murderous intent, when he carved his warning on the boy’s back. Chandelier fled the camp of the People of the Silk, with his left forefinger pressed into the tender crevice behind his left ear where the Maker’s knife had dug deepest. In his right hand he clutched the Pouch of Miriam threaded about his throat.He travelled by night because he still had some fear of Sky and the dizzying effects of the unbounded firmament. Night’s blackness also made it easier for him to hide. He knew that in these woods there was no chance he would meet bear, moose, or wolves — all species with which he was familiar from the books and videos in his father’s library. These forest animals had either been murdered by men, his father taught him, or poisoned or immolated in the falls of red rain, a climatic disaster for which wicked, selfish humans were also responsible. So it was the beings on two legs from whom the boy shrank whenever he caught wind of their approach. Their smell announced their presence long before he either saw or heard them. He then curled up and made himself small as Snake h
ad taught him. Or he crawled beneath a blanket of fallen leaves and became invisible.

  Sometimes he was fooled. One night he had to brake hard when he nearly stumbled over a man wrapped in a blanket, who sat cross-legged beside a prickly bush. The man had made a circlet of thorns for his head. The stars were so thickly clustered that the boy could see the blood trickling down the man’s cheeks from the piercing of the cruel crown. He was rocking and mumbling and seemed not to notice Chandelier at all. He had no smell. Afterwards, the boy wondered if this was because the man was good. But if that was the case, then why would he choose to hurt himself with the thorns?

  The third night he was not so lucky. He was moving silently and fast, skills he had mastered on the Egg’s running track. He was holding to true north, as the compass needle instructed, when the tree branches above him disgorged an unwelcome load, knocking him down. He was badly winded and the pain in his head was like serrated files, grinding one on another. He groaned and blinked and saw, sitting on his chest, a boy whose face was obscured by a spotted handkerchief. The boy had his hands clamped on Chandelier’s shoulders, with a force disproportionate to his size. Chandelier tried to shift his legs, and found to his dismay that these too, were weighted down. Were there two assailants then, or more than two? He could neither sit up, nor turn his head to look.

  Were they thieves or were they murderers? Would they kill and eat him?

  “What you got, sweet stuff?”

  Thieves, then. What did sweet stuff mean? Did they want his fruit? He was running through his options. How could he assert himself if he could not stand erect? Snake does not stand, he reminded himself, or at least not often. Take a cue, he hears Snake at his ear. Try cunning.

  “Get up, curly-top. Show us what you’ve got in your pockets.”

  He stood, swaying a little as he did so. He saw that they were in fact only two. But although he was older and taller than them both, they had a lean hardness that made him feel slight and unfinished. More disturbing to him was their agitation, which he strove not to absorb lest it tangle his thoughts. They were each like little pots on the boil. Their wrists twitched, as did their fingers. They ran upon the spot, lifting their knees high. They cocked their heads in one direction and then the other.

  They were listening for a call, Chandelier realized. They were tied to an invisible rope. They were someone’s toys to pull at will.

  “Move it, sweet stuff. Show us what you’ve got or we’ll rip your eyes out.”

  Toys, he thought again, and these are children. They like to play with things that move and glitter. Of the three precious things he carried — the metal and stone object his father been clutching when he died, the Pouch of Miriam and the compass — he knew it was the compass that would galvanize the children’s attention. He took the instrument out, laid it on his palm, and offered it to them like a holy relic.

  “Gimme.”

  Chandelier held his breath while the two boys studied the compass.

  “It moves. The little arrow thing shivers.” They made a sound that might have been laughter.

  “ A compass. To tell which way you are going.”

  “Hah! We’re all going to Hell. Everybody knows that.”

  “Think Ralph will like it?” the taller of the two asked the other.

  “Yup. It’s metal, innit?”

  “What else you got, sweet stuff?”

  Chandelier knew he must fight to the death to protect his last two precious belongings. He readied himself, feet planted firmly apart, and his fists as hard as he could make them.

  At that instant a whistle rent the air, one blast, then two more.

  “That’s come-back call,” said one.

  “What about him . . . ?” The other pointed to Chandelier.

  “Ralph’ll skin us if we’re last in again.”

  They spun round on the balls of their feet, and lifting their knees high, sped off in a peculiar loping run.

  Chandelier sank to the ground, trying to slow his breathing and quiet the thunder in his head. Then he moved on, a good half-mile from the site of the assault, and took refuge under leaf cover. He called on Morpheus, but a sore question kept poking at him. What was Ralph to those boys? Was it only fear of Ralph tugged them back on that invisible line, or was love like sons’ for their father twined there as well? The question hurt him, sounding out the depth of the void inside he recognized as his loneliness.

  When he set off the next night, clutching the Pouch of Miriam, he did not have even the stars from which to take his bearings. They were blotted out by slate cloud cover, overlaid by a kind of gluey haze that sometimes showed a purplish sheen. He knew he was lost; had been so since the moment he handed the compass over to the two boys. Why had he been so foolish? They might have settled for the nuts and raisins. He realized this was unlikely, but the idea dispirited him all the same.

  Keep going. Snake’s tongue flicked at his ear.

  Yes. But how tired he was and how leaden his feet. He had ceased running because the air was so heavy it clogged his lungs. He noticed that the trees around him were thinning and that sometimes they disappeared altogether. When that happened, the exposed ground looked grey and cracked.

  There were fewer trees in the North, or they grew scraggly there. Was that not what he had learned in the Egg? The sullen air made it hard for him to think clearly and remember things. What an amazing outcome, if he had indeed stumbled on the right track northward. Perhaps it was the Pouch of Miriam looking after him.

  Was this already the North? Up ahead he saw a mesmerizing sight that made him sure this was so. Wonderful lights in different colours played across the sky, swooping in great arcs and crossing each other. Orange he saw and pink and a yellow that dazzled his eyes. Were these the Northern Lights? Yes, they must be. His heart quickened and he propelled himself through the pall of his fatigue.

  As he came nearer, he was disappointed to see the lights become less, rather than more beautiful. The colours did not sparkle and shift their shapes as he had expected. There was no spectral emerald curtain shimmering like the pictures he had seen. Instead the light now looked coarse and even ugly, as if the night sky had been whipped and was showing its bloody welts. But if this was not the North, then where was he?

  Half an hour later, he had his answer. He was on the border of Danger-land. The six-letter word was spelled out in bold red capitals on white signs fixed to a fence more than twice his height. Made of wire mesh, it stretched as far as he could see in either direction. The fence barrier hummed and thrummed, and then began to buzz and crackle, making the hair on his wrists stand on end.

  He did not like this place. It was time to retreat to the woods, although it seemed there was nowhere outside the Egg — other than in Miriam’s arms — that was not full of danger. As if to prove this thought, three black shadows glided toward him. He stood rigid, listening to their nails click against the hard ground. Their harsh panting, undercut by snarls, made him swallow hard.

  “Stay still,” Snake said.

  The hair stood up all over his body as the three dogs circled him, bounding in close; and then away. Strings of saliva hung from their mouths. They showed him their teeth, which were long and sharp. I will be torn apart, the boy thought, just as my parents were, except that wild dogs will dismember me and not an explosion.

  Wake up! What food do you have?

  Nuts, dried fruit. Do dogs eat fruit?

  Try it.

  Chandelier dug in his pockets as one of the dogs leapt toward his chest. The boy stepped back before the animal could topple him. He tugged out four little bags of Miriam’s food and tossed them so that they scattered as widely as possible.

  The dogs’ heads turned. Their nostrils twitched.

  Will they? Yes. All three were tearing apart the little cloth bags, and bolting down the contents.

  What now? Where?

  “Hole,” Snake said. “Do you see it?”

  Yes. He had already seen it: about twenty feet
to his right there was an opening in the earth, with a metal cover partly pulled away. As Chandelier sped toward the hole, the dogs took chase.

  Go! Go!

  He dropped inside and found himself clinging to the rung of a ladder. Dogs cannot climb ladders, can they? The chorus of howls from above confirmed this was so.

  When he reached the bottom rung and turned round, he saw there was nowhere to go except forward into the mouth of a tunnel. Deeper and deeper he crawled into the cool dark. A sickening stench made him shrink back and retreat, bending as low and shuffling as quietly as he could manage. Then splat! He ran into an obstacle that had not been there when he entered the culvert. A blazing light shone in his face that made him wince. He blinked to adjust to the glare and saw before him a creature whose appearance made him feel ill because he was so unlike a man with his flat, deformed features and naked skull. A worm-man, Chandelier thought. Were there such things? This person was so ugly the boy almost pitied him. But fear far overwhelmed his pity. The inside of Chandelier’s mouth was dry and sore. He could hear his own ragged breathing and this sound of his own distress made him more panicky. He knew he must try to escape from this ill-made being and the nasty destiny it had in store for him. He could read his own fate on the worm-man’s face.

  But as he tried to slide away, bony fingers grasped his elbows from behind. A worm-man behind him and the other one in front had caught him fast. He found himself the captive of a band of Under-dwellers who had a penchant for mutilation. Their chief delight was decorating their sewer home and their clothing with fresh body parts. They coveted Chandelier’s ears, which were indeed exquisite: calyxes that might have been shaped by the hand of Cellini. Which of the five sewer butchers would secure the right to pin the severed ears to the shoulders of his jacket? “Ear-paulettes,” they cheered in chorus, and then laughed uproariously.