The Promise of the Child

Part 19 (updated daily)

Lycaste glanced at Impatiens, who was looking at the residue on the floor. It was smeared in oily sweeps, as if something had slipped in it. Diminishing marks paced around the tiles and faded back to the front door. The whisperers in the jungle sometimes ventured to the edges of the cove to forage, but he had never heard of them coming into anyone's house before.

Impatiens stared the longest, perhaps wondering at the profitability of importing real flesh. 'Where did that come from?'

Elcholtzia swung open a pair of tall wooden doors that led to the stairway and the angled upper floor. 'I have it delivered. They won't eat my grown stuffs, for some reason.' He regarded Lycaste solemnly. 'How are you enjoying the telescope, Lycaste?'

He'd forgotten all about it, there had been so much on his mind. The thing Elcholtzia had given him lay unused in the third tower, a slender tube like a rolled-up piece of paper. Elcholtzia had demonstrated its use to him as if instructing a stupid child.

'It's wonderful, Elcholtzia, thank you. I haven't had much time to use it properly, though.'

'You've been too busy?' He smiled thinly at Impatiens. 'Have you looked at anything in detail yet?'

'The Greenmoon,' Lycaste lied.

'Ah, and what did you see?'

Lycaste cursed the man, always trying to teach him things as if he were not yet grown-up, catching him out when he'd not learned his lessons. He thought of what he knew about the moon. 'I saw lots of trees.'

'Extraordinary – so you found a patch of clement weather?'

'I'm sorry?'

'Nothing but pea soup every time I've looked, not a break in the clouds for the last four months or so.'

Lycaste feigned poor memory. 'Maybe it was just clouds, not trees.'

Elcholtzia nodded. 'You should use it, Lycaste,' he said. 'It broadens the mind.'

Lycaste felt his face grow hot. 'I will, I promise. When I have the time.'

'When you have the time,' Elcholtzia repeated emptily, and led them into the first-floor chambers. They had to stoop to avoid hitting the wooden beams. Lycaste wondered why the man had sculpted his home so badly; everyone thought Lycaste so unintelligent, yet he would never have built his own house like this.

It smelled altogether cleaner up here, locked away from the death below. The air was spiced and smoky, the floors warm and boarded with smooth white wooden planks. There was no sound save for a muffled clicking that came from another room.

'Is the fire lit, Ez?' Impatiens asked, wandering to the next room to make tea. Lycaste watched his friend leave, afraid to be left alone with the old man. Impatiens almost never called Elcholtzia by his full name, an honour Lycaste himself had not yet earned. He thought it a strange name, suspiciously foreign-sounding. It had a bulkiness to it, an ugly, inelegant rhythm better suited to the villain in a stage play.

'Yes, I like the fragrance,' Elcholtzia replied, tilting his narrow head so that his voice would carry to the kitchen. 'My mother used to claim inhaling smoke was bad for the liver – what nonsense.'

Lycaste sat on some stained and ancient-looking cushions in a bright circle of sunlight that fell across the floor, shifting further back as the old man looked at him.

'Now then,' Elcholtzia said to him, 'what's this I hear about you and Pentas?'

Lycaste's colour drained.

'Don't go white.' Elcholtzia wheezed a laugh, waving a hand dismissively. 'I've heard it all from Eranthis anyway.'

Impatiens returned with steaming ceramic bowls of tea on a tin tray, placing them in the sunny spot with a rattle. 'You must see that you hire servants in the new year, Ez, I can't be making things and carrying all the time.' He looked between them. 'What are you saying to poor Lycaste? Don't interrogate him – he's shy enough as it is.'

'And he'll remain shy unless he's trained not to be. You cosset him, Impatiens.'

Lycaste took a bowl, burning his hand and wishing he were somewhere else.

Impatiens sat down, shaking his head. 'I'm his friend, not his mother.'

'Someone should write to that dear, maligned lady and send her an invitation,' said Elcholtzia. 'I'd very much like to meet whatever produced Lycaste here. Are your parents as good-looking as you, Lycaste?'

He put the tea down, fingers smarting. 'They're handsome enough.'

Elcholtzia studied him. 'I daresay not as much as you. Another suitor arrived here not long ago. Wanted to know which house was yours.'

Lycaste rubbed his burned skin and looked up. He'd received no visitors this summer.

'I sent her the other way, towards Izmirean. She's probably still walking, poor thing.'

'Attractive?' Impatiens asked.

'Not classically. She was very insistent. Told me she'd heard about our Lycaste from the usual source, those damned Players.'

Impatiens tried to drink his tea, gasping at the temperature. 'From which Province?'

'Sixth.'

He pointed at Lycaste. 'That reminds me – Lycaste says he's seen someone new about.'

'I wasn't sure,' muttered Lycaste. 'I told you that.'

Elcholtzia examined him again. 'What did you see?'