The Promise of the Child

Part 18 (updated daily)

They set off again slowly, Lycaste following dejectedly behind as his mood darkened once more, and descended into a shaded valley. Abruptly stopping in a clearing of wild flowers, he realised he'd lost his friend altogether. It was those long legs of his; at very nearly ten feet tall, Impatiens was larger than any other Melius man Lycaste knew. He wasn't worried; the path had diverged but he knew to follow the slope of the ground upwards to Elcholtzia's house, high on the next hill.

The sighting of the shark had got him thinking. He received more suitors at his door than passing sharks, and yet here was one, the very day after he had been told of the plan. He began to wonder whether Impatiens knew more about the creatures' movements than he let on.

Lycaste continued on up the hill, clinging at rough branches as the ground steepened, but could see nobody ahead in the shadows. He brushed the dirt from his hands and listened, quite used to being forgotten by now. It happened so often that he barely registered it, sinking into his own thoughts as his friends ran ahead or debated some abstract notion that he hadn't a hope of understanding.

As his breathing subsided he began to hear it: soft murmuring, like a secret conversation in some dark corner. Lycaste crouched in the undergrowth, smelling sweet sap and soil. The light was blocked by more than just tree branches at the edges of his vision. Gesturing, clothed forms whispered to one another.

He'd been spotted. The creatures of the woods were discussing him now. Branches cracked and snapped as they moved, perhaps trying to see him better. Lycaste kept his gaze on the slope; he didn't want to appear nervous. They'd seen him often, and he was fairly sure they knew who he was by now. A friendly wave was often the best way to acknowledge their presence, for they never approached. Of course it had occurred to him that they could be the ones watching him in his orchard, but there was no evidence that they were at all bothered about the lives of the people sharing their land. Still, he hardly enjoyed their company; it was like peering from the window of a brightly lit room into the darkness of night, unknown things looking back at you.

Sounds to his left, on the slope not far away. He slowly resumed his scramble up towards the rise, lifting his arm and waving once as he climbed. The voices stopped briefly at the tiny gesture, then continued. Listening hard, Lycaste fancied he could, as usual, hear pieces of recognisable words in among the whispers. The rhythms were all wrong, though; he couldn't separate individual sentences from the mutterings around him. One of the words sounded all too familiar, though no doubt reconstructed wrongly by his racing imagination. Pentas.

As he reached for another dry branch, a thin red arm grabbed his wrist, startling him. Impatiens grinned, hoisting Lycaste up as the ground turned to loose soil.

'You took the difficult route,' he said softly, glancing over Lycaste's shoulder.

'Are they following?'

'No.'

The ground levelled as the trees thinned, bathing them in the afternoon sun. The two men staggered out under the livid blue sky and saw that the flowers here were ordered and arranged. The mumbling from the jungle was replaced by the grumble of bees clambering heavily in and out of gaudy flowers. They had reached the edge of Elcholtzia's garden, in the clearing atop the highest hill.

A sandstone path led them through the rows of colour to a gate set in a low white wall. Just ahead was the observatory, curling southwards like a wind-bent palm. Rugs, tapestries and linens hung from the crenellated balconies of the top-floor, fluttering and drying in the sun, draping down over the rear garden where the building bent back on itself. It was not, as far as either of them could discern, actually an observatory for it observed nothing, but that was how Elcholtzia grandly referred to his house on the hill. The white structure in which he lived had been almost entirely sculpted by the wind, with a sparing hand guiding it only as it deformed in the Mediterranean breeze. As with all buildings, it had been grown; implanted in the ground where its stone-like material had replicated faster than a living thing, sinking hollow capillary roots into the rock for water pipes and pouring with a whisper in every direction. It required only a firm grip or scaffolding to mould the stone as it knitted together, and within a few days you had a fine translucent shell in which to live, the sun glowing through it like the delicate skin of an ear. Extensions were added by notching the material, injuring its surface so that the thin bone of the structure reacted, growing soft and pliable again as it spread to fill the wound. Elcholtzia had grown the observatory himself years before the others arrived, when their Province was so lonely that you wouldn't see another person all month, and its S-shaped form was quite unique on the rugged slope.

With one last peek at the shadows behind, Lycaste made his way up the path, ducking occasionally as fat, downy bees droned past. Elcholtzia appeared at the doorway beyond the gate, a streak of deep orange aglow against the dazzling white walls of the misshapen building. He appeared like that with every visit, as if warned of their approach. Each time the old man stood unsmiling, waiting for them to pass through the gate, watching that they closed it properly.

'Gate?' he asked them as they approached.

'Shut,' muttered Impatiens for what could well have been the thousandth time. Watching them while they embraced, Lycaste took in how the old man had changed. His gristly frame now looked even more delicate, skin stretched over bone. Elcholtzia moved to Lycaste and patted him with a scrawny hand, thanking him for coming in his dry, uninterested voice.

Inside the antechamber it was very cool, the chill air suffused with a faintly unpleasant smell both sweet and sour. Lycaste tried to think what it reminded him of, but Impatiens got there first.

'You must try to air this place. It smells like death.'

The old man took them across the sunken cylindrical main chamber of the place to the steps, passing through long shafts of sunlight churning with golden motes. He stepped around a pool of greasy residue in the middle of the floor and pointed to the warped, painted ceiling high above. It was swarming with black flies. Just below them dangled a haunch of scarlet meat, half-illuminated in the glow of one window.

'Lamb. For my visitors.'